A Message-array-based Mechanism for Tracking Control Effects in Supervisory Control Software

Supervisory control is a very popular paradigm for computer-controlled systems. Knowledge and tracking the control effect of every control operation is crucial to the control tasks. In the paper, we present a message-array-based mechanism to track control effects in supervisory control software. A novel data type, message array, is designed to efficiently support this tracking mechanism. The operation algorithms, adding algorithm (AA), removing algorithm (RA), and scheduler algorithm (SA) are proposed to operate the tracking messages in message array, which forms the special first input X output (FIXO) strategy of message array. Automatically tracking, recording, and rolling back are the characteristics of our tracking mechanism. We implement this message-array-based mechanism on the famous human machine interface (HMI) software platform-proficy iFix, and construct experiments to evaluate the performance of the mechanism in various cases. The results show our mechanism can be well satisfied with supervisory control software.