AN INTEGRATED CONCEPT OF AUTOMATED INSTRUMENT CONTROL, QUALITY ASSURANCE AND DATA REPORTING FOR DIOXIN FURAN ANALYSIS/

TACO (TArget Compound analysis software) is a newly designed software package that is used as common user interface for QUANTUM, a new high resolution target compound analyzer. It coordinates instrument control of the high resolution mass spectrometer, the gas chromatograph and t he autosampler. It takes care about data acquisition, data evaluation and quantitation according to predefined methods. These methods also d etermine quality control parameters from the mass spectrometer and fro m the data evaluation. System performance parameters can be checked ag ainst method dependent limits and may stop batch processing via feedba ck control. TACO finally generates reports that integrate text and gra phics in a flexible user defined format.