Engine Based Embedded Control System Design and Implementation

Embedded control systems play a very important role in the modern industry, which fulfill various complicated and durable control tasks in automation industry. A typical embedded control system consist of a microprocessor based hardware and a set of software running on top of it. Due to rapid upgrading and function changing, the life cycle of embedded control system becomes shorter and shorter. For the current embedded control system solution, it is usually lack of reconfigurability and secondary development ability. This makes the reusing of the existing design very hard, which usually involves intensive modification or even rewriting of software codes. To ease such kind of system design as well as shorten program coding period, an engine based design method is proposed in this paper. This method separates the embedded system function description and its executor as a Function Description Data (FDD) and an Engine. The FDD used by the Engine stores the system control logic and processing rules of external/internal stimuli. The Engine responses to these stimuli and processes them according to the description of FDD. A Statechart based modeling tool is applied to conduct the FDD design. By doing so, whenever the system function changing or updating is required, only its FDD needs to be regenerated, the Engine remains the same. The embedded control system development burden can be then greatly simplified. Also its secondary development ability can be realized even at shop floor level. A case study of a CNC system is introduced to verify the feasibility of the proposed method.