Our customers are always looking for the best automation solutions to deal with the increasingly fierce market competition. CASE is the abbreviation of Computer Aided Software Engineering in English. It mainly refers to using a set of methods and tools to model system rules and automatically generate suitable programs. The popularity of the CASE concept in the field of self-controlled software design has been a matter of recent years, but the rapid pace of development is contrary to many people's expectations. At each stage of the design, as many computer tools as possible are used to help designers complete the design with high quality, and as much as possible reduce the number of different tools or product types that need to be used, reduce the reacquisition of data between different tools, and improve design reusability. , Reducing the amount of learning required for designers to master different tools and reducing overall design and operating costs. Because the concept of CASE brings about a completely change in the field of self-controlled software design, the entire field has been elevated to a new level, and it has quickly become popular in the European and American self-control industries in just one or two years.
ControlBuild products are the first full-process CASE solution in the field of self-controlled software design, covering everything from design specification, design, code generation, simulation verification to implementation.

1. Design Specifications: Executable Specifications (Formal Design)
The first step in the design of self-controlled software is to complete the design specifications according to the needs of users. The design specification is the basis for all subsequent work, and its quality directly affects the quality of the entire design. At present, the use of text-based tools (such as Word, Excel, etc.) is commonly used in China. However, due to the characteristics of the text language itself, the understanding of each person of the same text often varies, and text-based design specifications inevitably create ambiguities and misunderstandings between users and designers. These errors are often not discovered until the final stage of design or even the installation phase of the site, causing huge waste and significant costs. Therefore, how to resolve all ambiguities in the earliest stages of design, fully communicate with users and ensure that the design specification fully meets the needs of users is extremely important.

With ControlBuild, designers can fully use "executable" instructions based on textual instructions. The so-called "executable" means that at the very beginning of the design, the designer through the analysis of user needs, the high-level design of the system, the use of user-friendly graphical methods of the system decomposition and formal modeling. This visualizes text-based design specifications and communicates clearly and accurately with customers. Formal modeling of site objects can eliminate ambiguous terms in the user's requirement list, and reduce the risk of modifying the design later in the project. As a result, all ambiguities, misunderstandings and ambiguities are avoided at the beginning of design. This is currently the internationally-executable specification and is a form of formal design that is currently very popular internationally.
Some domestic organizations have also recognized the flaws of text-based design specifications, and sometimes they use Visio-like tools to draw high-level functional decompositions and communicate them to users. However, the drawback of this approach is that such a graphical representation is actually only a schematic description and cannot check the validity of the inter-module connection. On the other hand, this schematic diagram can only serve as a reference when the actual system is implemented. It cannot be tightly integrated with the implementation process and it is forcibly required to be completely consistent with the actual implementation, thereby greatly weakening its practical role.
2, design: top-down, bottom-up design method
ControlBuild gradually decomposes the entire system into the most basic components through the functional decomposition of high-level requirements, and can complete the design by describing the components through graphical language. This is a top-down design method.

On the other hand, there are many common or identical components in the system. Designing a component template can create many instances through replication and design the entire system like building blocks. This is a bottom-up design method. ControlBuild supports the mixed use of two methods.
Whenever a component design is done, ControlBuild can easily unit test to ensure that the components are correct. In addition, for a complex component consisting of multiple components, ControlBuild can reuse the results of each unit test for integration testing.
3, automatic design document generation In the traditional self-control design, the manual preparation of design documents takes a considerable amount of time and effort of the design staff, is one of the most unwilling designers to do. It is not only time-consuming and laborious to manually write design documents. More importantly, it is difficult to ensure that the design documents and designs written are in full compliance. Every change to the design brings changes to the design document or even completely rewrites, wasting a lot of effort and time. ControlBuild automatic design document generation tool can effectively solve this problem. What the designer needs to do is click the mouse, all the designs will automatically generate the document, anytime, anywhere. From the basic components to the entire system, user-customized design documents can be generated. When the design changes, the document can be easily generated again with a single click, and the generated design document and design are exactly the same, saving a lot of time and manpower in writing the document.
4. Automatic Generation of Control Codes With the popularity of control code auto-generation tools, more and more designers began to abandon the manual writing of control codes and turned to the use of automatic tools. The designer described the developed project through ControlBuild graphical software development tool (IEC61131-3 language) and established a formal model of the entire system. Then the ControlBuild code auto-generation tool can generate PLC or C source code based on the model. Automatically generating code can greatly improve design quality:
Improve code quality Improve code reusability Reduce development time and costs Reduce debugging time and design exactly match. If the design changes, the program code stays consistent. This is a full, fully understandable system design method because the developer's idea is automatically implemented to allow simulation on one host before integration into the target device. Normative and comprehensive.
5. Simulation verification Today, long-term on-site commissioning has become intolerable! End-users have been giving system integrators more and more time, and have imposed high fines for delays. This forced automatic control system integrators to perform self-control code design verification tests before on-site commissioning, find and correct most of the design errors, thus ensuring the use of the shortest on-site time to complete the installation and commissioning of the system.
Obviously, it is the most natural solution to establish a formal model of on-site objects through simulation and then verify and verify the self-control software in this simulation environment. Of course, such simulation verification must be carried out under a complete simulation environment (simulating the entire production line or even the entire plant environment). Since the simulation tools provided by various hardware manufacturers can only simulate and test a single functional block, they cannot perform this task. , you must use advanced control software design tools like ControlBuild.
Using ControlBuild to perform simulation verification tests has unparalleled advantages:
1. Verify the test automation software under the simulation environment, find and correct most of the design errors, and greatly shorten the on-site installation and commissioning time. According to foreign experience, the on-site installation and commissioning time can be reduced to several weeks through simulation verification, which greatly improves efficiency.
2, in the simulation environment, change the environment and production conditions, test design response
3, in the simulation environment, can introduce a variety of abnormalities, failures, destructive testing of the design
4, in the simulation environment, the virtual machine can be used 100%
5, in the simulation environment, there is more time to test and modify
6, the simulation environment provides a better working environment, to avoid entering some high-risk situations (high temperature, acid, explosive, toxic, etc.)
7. If the physical equipment or system is not actually installed or connected, it can be verified and tested earlier and put into production earlier.
8, system operators and maintenance personnel can receive training earlier to improve the level of operation and maintenance.
6, transparent design: maintenance and upgrade In the current domestic traditional design methods, the design of automatic control system integrators for the end user is completely "black box" design. After the project was completed, the design documents and control codes left by the suppliers were often unintelligible. The users had become “dumpsters” and had no idea how their own automation system was designed and operated. This will bring great difficulties to the user's system maintenance and future system upgrades!
ControlBuild uses the internationally popular "transparent design" concept. Self-control integrators use ControlBuild to design during the design process. From the initial design specifications to the entire system implementation stage, they communicate with users. The entire process is transparent to the user. The user fully knows how to design the system. This will maintain and upgrade the system in the future. It is very good.
7. Full-flow automation software solutions Although there are several CASE tools at each design stage to help designers design, for a complete design process, designers often need to master and use multiple tools. This is obviously Not satisfactory.
This is why ControlBuild's full-flow solution naturally becomes one of the designer's favorites. ControlBuild's full-flow design tools cover everything from design specification, design, code generation, simulation verification, to system implementation. While enjoying the great benefits of CASE tools, designers do not need to capture between different tools. Data, without learning and mastering multiple tools at the same time, greatly reduces design costs and improves design efficiency.