Abstract
This paper presents a semi-automatic methodology to synthesize executable digital controller saftware in a multi-loop control system. A digital controller is described by a task graph and end-to-end timing requirements. A task graph denotes the software structure of the controller, and the end-to-end requirements establish timing relationships between external inputs and outputs. Our approach translates the end-to-end requirements into a set of task attributes such as task periods and deadlines using nonlinear optimization techniques. Such attributes are essential for control engineers to implement control programs and schedule them in a control system with limited resources. In current engineering practice, human programmers manually derive those attributes in an ad hoc manner: they often resort to radical over-sampling to safely guarantee the given timing requirements, and thus render the resultant system poorly utilized. After task-specific attributes are derived, the tasks are scheduled on a single CPU and the compiled kernel is synthesized. We illustrate this process with a non-trivial servo motor control system.
