I-I-CON - A VISUAL COMMUNICATIONS PARADIGM TO INTEGRATE INDUSTRIAL CONTROL-SYSTEM ENGINEERING

The process control industries have seen a great explosion in differen t function block programming languages over the last five years. Each of these languages is proprietary meaning that there is no ability to port one function block program to another platform. Some standards fo r process control symbology have been developed, but they lack the ric hness of graphic expression often contained in the commercial products . There are also problems with integrating the continuous-time functio n block languages with discrete-event languages used on programmable l ogic controllers (PLCs), though the integration of these two types of control are often needed in practice. I-I-Con is being designed to pro vide an open-systems platform for both continuous-time PID control and discrete-event PLC control using a single integrated paradigm. The I- I-Con programming language is also intended to integrate industrial co ntrol software design with coding by capitalizing on the similarity of Petri-net like diagrams which have been used both to program PLCs and to perform general systems design and engineering. Thus, the same pic tures which are used to perform systems design can then be used to cod e the control application. Here we describe the I-I-Con project at the University of Cincinnati. We intend for the I-I-Con project to have a major impact on how industrial control systems are developed in the f uture. We are currently soliciting suggestions and criticisms from the industrial controls community while the project is in its formative s tages.