Research On The Software Design Automation Technology Of The Intelligent Instrumentation

With the development of computer and microelectronics technologies in recent years, the industrial field-instrumentation is gradually becoming the intelligent instrumentation controlled by microprocessor, which is called intelligent instrumentation. Meanwhile, with the development of microprocessor on fast processing speed and large capacity flash memory, there appears great developing space for intelligent instrumentation in the aspects of information processing and function system, which leads to the increasing workload and complexity in the software development and function. The software design of the intelligent instrumentation system has already become one of the most important tasks in the intelligent instrumentation research.Investigations are deeply made on automation of the software design since the 1980s. Based on object-oriented design, object-oriented analysis, object modeling, component assembling technologies and so on, some mature software design automation tools about CASE(the computer-aided software engineering) appeared in the software domain. And the CASE technology has already formed special theory and architecture in particular manufacture domain. It has influenced the software design mode and promoted further automation research in all software fields. Since each project has its own background, knowledge covering and its research work disperser, such as intelligent instrumentation, which makes it easily ignored on its generic technology in software function. It is difficult to form a uniform acknowledge and research on the software design automation on the remands of these special fields. Therefore, considering the characteristics that the intelligent instrumentation system has its own software system, a new concept of the software automation of the intelligent instrumentation software system is proposed by combining the instrumentation knowledge and the software engineering knowledge. And it is implemented by use of the technology in the paper.Firstly, according to the characteristic of the intelligent instrumentation products, traditional development process and generic technologies are analyzed. On the basis of the above research, the concepts of the system data-flow and system check-point are proposed. Further the idea of software automation is put forward. That is, in order to enhance the software design automation of the intelligent instrumentation to complete the automation in full life cycle, a special hardware architecture based on the generic model is built so that various tasks during the software development are implemented with the aid of computer.Secondly, a special hardware architecture of the intelligent instrumentation is put forward which is built on the generic model to adapt to software design automation. In this paper, a new kind of data exchange called state variable data exchange is presented to promote the software design automation under the special hardware architecture. Moreover, the dissertation analyzes the performances between the real-time scheduling system and the non-real-time scheduling system using data exchange, which will be good instructions to further research and development under this architecture.Thirdly, the main point of this dissertation- software design automation of the intelligent instrumentation is put forward. The dissertation gives out the hierarchies of signal processing software system and defines these components in each hierarchy. In order to realize the design automation based on the component assembling, a practical connector called joint matrix is brought forward. Then, a new data-driven IVR model based on the existing interactive interface model is presented to implement the interactive interface software design automation. In addition, interactive model, resource model, view display through informal semantics and state graph are deeply described in the dissertation. And a new method is introduced based on the above model. Finally, a platform is built by use of integrating tools among software design automation methods.Finally, an intelligent flow instrumentation example is implemented by use of presented theories and technologies like multi-processor hardware architecture, data exchange, signal process software design automation, interactive interface software design automation in the dissertation. It is proved that the new concept and methodology in the dissertation not only provide a kind of rule to guide the whole performance of the software system but also help to rapidly build the hardwareprototype of objective system in intelligent flow instrumentation.In the new concept of software design automation of the intelligent instrumentation system in the dissertation, some new methods and technologies not only provide a kind of new research method and technology for software design automation in intelligent instrumentation domain but also offer a new idea for software design automation in other intelligent device domain.