An algorithm for block diagram processing and the DiaBloS tool for systems simulation

VPL is a visual programming language and environment for interactive image processing. VPL uses a novel system architecture which separates interaction and computation components in order to provide a highly interactive visual programming user-interface. VPL is based on a declarative, demand driven dataflow model of computation. It is a practical, usable visual programming system, integrating tools for browsing, inspecting and editing components and documentation. VPL also provides data persistence and data import/export mechanisms. The visual programming model supports both function extensibility and higher order functions, allowing users to build their own program dataflow structures within the VPL environment. >

The authors evaluate a new general-purpose visual programming system, PrologSpace. The system addresses classic issues of visual interfaces: layout, shape, colour, and iconography; and those of particular concern to visual programming: multiple views (visual abstractions), synchronised views, integration of visual and textual dimensions, visual debugging, cognitive dimensions, and the problems of scale. They describe the system and examine its cognitive dimensions. They argue that: (1) PrologSpace enhances Prolog programming, and (2) PrologSpace has better 'viscosity', 'visibility', and 'secondary notation' than two other notable general visual programming systems and without any significant loss of dimensionality in other respects.

ABSTRACTOne objective of a soil morphology, genesis, and classification course is to teach students how to generate reasonable hypotheses to explain soil distributions on landscapes. By the end of the course, students can begin to make predictions regarding changes in soil properties as a function of landscape elements and how different groupings of soils are indicated by mapping unit definitions or soil taxa. The block diagram problem is an exercise that helps the students to teach themselves about the relationships between taxonomic names, soil properties, and soil distributions on three‐dimensional landscapes. The students' task in the block diagram problem is to match a list of soil series to a list of taxonomic names using a block diagram and soil series descriptions. The student is provided with the following information; family names from Soil Taxonomy, block diagrams, and soil series descriptions. Block diagrams help students visualize areas of water spreading or concentration, the relative stability of geomorphic surfaces, and distribution of parent materials. Soil series descriptions give morphological clues to the extent to which soil‐forming processes have taken place, such as horizon differentiation. Students use principles of soil morphology, genesis, and geomorphology to relate series names to soil taxa. Block diagram problems help evaluate whether the objectives of the course have been met and make excellent homework and final examination questions.

The paper is a partial synthesis of the work that a team within the Faculty of Managerial and Technological Engineering has in the field of modeling and simulation of systems with Petri nets. The paper deals with three issues. The first part is Modeling and simulation of manufacturing systems with timed Petri nets. The first part presents the way in which the performances of some manufacturing systems are evaluated using timed Petri nets. The first example is a manufacturing system specific to the textile industry. The system has three production lines. In this case, the modeling with timed Petri nets allows the analysis of the operation of the flow lines and highlights the bottleneck. Another modeled manufacturing system is specific to a series production, more precisely it refers to the manufacture of gas cookers within a company from Oradea. The model with Petri nets also describes the supply sequences of the stocks of parts and subassemblies. The next modeled system is an automated manufacturing system for the packaging of detergents. The complexity of the Detergent Packing System and the high level of automation, require the use of efficient modeling and simulation methods to verify the validity of the solutions adopted. In this chapter is present the model of a robotic welding cell. The second part of the paper, the transition from timed Petri nets to hierarchical colored Petri nets, shows how Petri nets were developed for a robotic cell for metallographic analysis. The third part is dedicated to modeling with colored Petri nets timed with complex colors of the flexible manufacturing cell A007 within the Department of Industrial Engineering.

This paper presents performance comparisons of two graphical techniques for modeling and simulation of complex nonlinear mechatronic systems. These techniques are respectively Bond Graph (BG) structural approach and Block Diagram (BD) which is a functional approach. They are applied for the modeling of single wheel electrical vehicle. The BG model is elaborated under 20-SIM environment, while the BD model is developed using Matlab/Simulink.

A home automation system means monitoring and controlling various kinds of devices in the home remotely using the Internet of things (IoT). Technologies such as natural language processing techniques, user-friendly visual programming, and machine intelligence programming are already available for home automation. For such systems, the increase in the number of devices often makes users focused on the system’s ability to perform complex or composing tasks. However, some existing natural language processing systems can only perform simple tasks and cannot meet users’ needs. Thus, it is difficult for users to develop the home automation systems they need using visual programming systems because of the large amount of programming knowledge required. Meanwhile, automatic programming without user action can only write a few lines of code and implement little functionality. There are relatively few tools available for generating home automation scripting languages. To address this problem, we propose a practical method for generating executable home automation scripts using Chinese texts. Our method includes the following steps: it extracts critical information from the command sentences in Chinese; it uses first-order logic to check the validity of the extracted information; based on the validation, the correct sentences are mapped into the intermediate language scripts, which can interface with different home platforms. We conducted experiments on Home Assistant, converted intermediate scripts to Home Assistant, and collected 600 scenario descriptions. The experimental results show that the method can automatically generate executable scripts for the Home Assistant platform, and the correct rate was 93.66%.

Visual programming systems are supposed to simplify programing by capitalizing on innate human spatial reasoning skills. We claim (a) that good visual programing environments should be oriented toward their application domains and (b) tools to build such domain-oriented environments are needed because building them from scratch is very difficult. The poster describes a system called Agentsheets addressing these issues and illustrates how the system was applied to a real-world application helping professional telephone voice dialog designers.

Simulation of power semiconductor systems as an educational tool

Scilab is a free open-source software package for scientific computation. It includes hundreds of general purpose and specialized functions for numerical computation, organized in libraries called toolboxes, which cover such areas as simulation, optimization, systems and control, and signal processing. One important Scilab toolbox is Scicos. Scicos provides a block diagram graphical editor for the construction and simulation of dynamical systems. The objective of this book is to provide a tutorial for the use of Scilab/Scicos with a special emphasis on modeling and simulation tools. While it will provide useful information to experienced users it is designed to be accessible to beginning users from a variety of disciplines. Students and academic and industrial scientists and engineers should find it useful. The book is divided into two parts. The first part concerns Scilab and includes a tutorial covering the language features, the data structures and specialized functions for doing graphics, importing, exporting data and interfacing external routines. It also covers in detail Scilab numerical solvers for ordinary differential equations and differential-algebraic equations. Even though the emphasis is placed on modeling and simulation applications, this part provides a global view of Scilab. The second part is dedicated to modeling and simulation of dynamical systems in Scicos. This type of modeling tool is widely used in industrybecause it provides a means for constructing modular and reusable models. This part contains a detailed description of the editor and its usage, which is illustrated through numerous examples. All codes used in the book is made available to the reader. This new edition includes expanded chapters, new exercises and major rewrites for examples to work with the new Maple.

Modeling, identification and simulation of mechatronic systems

Modeling and Simulation of Flexible Manufacturing Systems Controlled by Petri Nets

A signal-processing software system is described which allows the simulation of systems described by block diagrams or signal-flow graphs. A high-level data-flow language describes the interconnection of the components. All configurations of interconnections are allowed, including those containing feedback. Component systems (blocks) are allowed to be multi-input, multi-output, and to be programmed in any language. Blocks are implemented as separate processes running under a UNIX2 operating system. Input and output signals are transferred between blocks via the UNIXpipe facility. Thedata type of a signal is arbitrary in the context of the compiler; within a component or system, signals and internal variables can be either floating point or fixed point. The compiler enforces strong or weak type checking of signals according to the characteristics of the blocks generating and receiving the signals. The invariance of the program to implementation data type is accomplished by the use of abstract data types. Fixed-point simulations having differing number of bits per signal and per internal variable in a block are supported. Special display software is used to allow any signal in the system to be displayed on any graphics device.

The goals of this paper are: (a) to investigate adaptive and fractional-order adaptive control algorithms for an automatic anesthesia process, using a closed-loop system, and (b) to develop an easy-to-use tool for MATLAB/Simulink to facilitate simulations for users with less knowledge about anesthesia and adaptive control. A model reference adaptive control structure was chosen for the entire system. First of all, to control the patient’s state during the surgery process, the patient mathematical model is useful, or even required for simulation studies. The pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamics (PK/PD) model was determined using MATLAB’s SimBiology tool, starting from a previously available block diagram, and validated through simulation. Then, to achieve the desired control performances, two controllers are designed: a PI adaptive controller and a PIλ (PI-fractional) adaptive controller, using the MIT algorithm. The time response during anesthetic drug infusion for each patient can be plotted with the AnesthesiaGUIDE tool, which is also designed in MATLAB/Simulink. The tool was tested on data from 12 patients, subjected to general anesthesia, with successful results. Through this tool, the article provides a good opportunity for any user to experience with adaptive control for the anesthesia process.

Simulation of dynamic biochemical systems is receiving considerable attention due to increasing availability of experimental data of complex cellular functions. Numerous simulation tools have been developed for numerical simulation of the behavior of a system described in mathematical form. However, there exist only a few evaluation studies of these tools. Knowledge of the properties and capabilities of the simulation tools would help bioscientists in building models based on experimental data. We examine selected simulation tools that are intended for the simulation of biochemical systems. We choose four of them for more detailed study and perform time series simulations using a specific pathway describing the concentration of the active form of protein kinase C. We conclude that the simulation results are convergent between the chosen simulation tools. However, the tools differ in their usability, support for data transfer to other programs and support for automatic parameter estimation. From the experimentalists' point of view, all these are properties that need to be emphasized in the future.

A visual programming system is described that allows the modeler full flexibility in defining the behavior of a manufacturing system simulation model. Decision-making behavior of objects in the simulation can be viewed by watching an animation of the system layout, viewing function block diagrams of rules that govern behavior, or noting the progress of an object in carrying out sequences of activities that are pictured as operation networks. Rules, elemental operations and operation networks are structured and associated with particular objects, groups of objects, and locations on the manufacturing system layout. The objective of this system is to reduce the time and expense required to construct and modify models, given that manufacturing system data have been collected.