During the last two decades the computer technics developes with acceleration and variety of the end products which has been never seen up to now in the history of the technics and technology. Of course, this developement is not something extraordinary: it follows the general tendency for accelerating the technical and technological developement, which started very slowly when Archimedes constructed the water elevating gear in the 3rd century B.C. and the steam engine about 1780. In 1860 E. Lenoir constructed the internal conbustion engine, which has been improved to its contemporary form by N. Otto and R. Diesel. The knowledge of the electromagnetism logically led to the contruction of the electical motor about the beginning of the 20 century.
Notable development of the automatics began in the second half of the 19 century with the theoretical studies of J. C. Maxwell (“About the Regulation”, 1866), I. A. Vishegradsky (“About the Direct Feed Regulators”, 1877), A. M. Lyapunov (“The General Problem of Movement Stability”, 1892). During of the first half of the 20 century the automatic regulators became widespread. They were being constructed with analog elements: in weak current circuits electronics was used and in heavy current ones – contactor circuits. Heavy current circuits were used for direct control of heavy mechanical processes, the electronics – to process the information at the input and output of the system and to control the heavy current circuits. Both kinds of circuits were used for voltage and current protection. More then 90% of the regulators used were single-channel PID or relay regulators.
In 1939 John Atanassov contructed a gear for solving systems of non-linear differential equations which founded the development of computing technics. The computer found rapidly its application in process automation. The list of these applications has been growing at breakneck speed since the 60s, when the construction of the microprocessor and the development of the technology for producing integrated circuits with large and extralarge integration level allowed to replace the miles of contactor circuits and the enourmous shelves with printed boards with one or several chips of common surface of several square inches. The entry of computer into the industry allowed to implement in practice for long known technologies for automatic control such as the adaptive self-adjusting regulator with parameter estimation in real time. These technologies had been for long time only interesting theoretical studies because with the existing analog control circuits its implementation in practice had been impossible due to the continuous need of large amount of calculations.
Today there is virtually no industrial process which does not use any form of computer control. In the last decade the control of the industrial production and informational streams of a given production are getting unied in a common computer system building a complex hierarchy. Such systems are coming to Bulgaria too.
The task of the current Graduation Paper is to create a project for a program packet for configuring and adjusting of computer systems for industrial process control. For shortness, it will be called Configurator below.
The Graduation Paper is divided into two parts:
In the first part the theoretical bases for building a finished informational and control computer systems are shown.
In the second part the project of the Configurator is shown.

The text of the Graduation Paper is divided into two parts.
Part One consists of chapters 1, 2 and 4. It shows the theorietical principals for developing computer systems for industrial processes control in real time. In sequence the general principals for building informational-and-control, centralized, decentralized and distributed systems, network topologies and operating systems are shown. In brief the principals of ISO/OSI for building field busses and protocols are also shown.
Chapter 3 shows the principals for developing a configurable (module) system for industrial processes control in real time: functional blocks and nodes, input-output ports, informational streams and processes (programs), defining the functionality of each node. The two possible solutions are shown: the implicit and explicit one. In the implicit solution the functionality is determined from the building blocks and the informational streams; in the explicit solution the functionality is defined by a program and the informational streams define only the connections between the inputs and outputs of the functional blocks.
The second part consists of Chapters 5 – 8. A project for a program packet for computer aided design of configurable systems for industrial processes control in real time, called Configurator, is suggested. Using the Configurator principle schematic systems are designed which are not bound with a final topology, processor platform and operating system of the end system. A language for defining nodes functionality is also developed. The language conforms to the special properties of this kind of systems. (the syntax of the language, called KoSCRIPT, is a mixture between C, Pascal and BASIC and gives possibilities to work with different types and formats of data, uncluding structurized, as well as to organize parallel computations). The given source program text is compiled to code for virtual processor (p-code). The software architecture of this processor is shown in details (Chapter 9). The Configurator is shown as a program packet in Chapters 5 and 6. The packet is developed for Windows 95/98/NT/2000/Me/Xp and is based on the COM technology (Component Object Model) which gives, on one hand, possibilities for unlimited expansion of the functionality of the Configurator and the designed informational-control systems and, on the other hand, independance of the Configurator and the extension modules (libraries) of the programming language (the kernel of the Configurator and the base libraries are implemented using Borland Delphi 4 Professional). All interfaces that a library must implement in order for it to become a functional module of the Configurator are shown in details.
The Configurator outputs information about the designed system in standardized format. Chapter 8 is dedicated to the format of the output files. The developed format is left open for further extension while retaining compatibility with older versions of the Configurator and other products.

During the Graduation Paper developement the author worked for Galabov-Co Ltd. and took part in projecting and developing a series of industrial controllers which form the core of the compnany’s products. The gained practical experience is used during the Graduation Paper developement: examples of implemented and used in regular exploitation industrial plants are given; the KoSCRIPT language and a software implementation of the virtual processor were also first embedded in a core product of the company.

The suggested in this Graduation Paper “Project of a Configurator for Computer Systems for Instrial Processes Control in Real Time” conforms to the modern tendencies in the computer systems developement. In addition, it has the following advantages:

• Openness – the Configurator is projected so, that nearly unlimited expansions of its functionality is very easy;
• Standard Model – standard technologies for object linking and embedding have been used, which allows the addition of new functionality to be independant of the tools the Configurator itself has been implemented with;
• Independance – the Configurator is projected to design abstract control systems. For this reason the output data format is not bound neither to concrete processor platforms nor to a concrete network topology, nor to a concrete fieldbus protocol. The definition of these parameters of the control systems design lies out of the scope of the primary task of the Configurator. Nevertheless, the possibility for expanding the Configurator functionality allows these aspects to be included too.

At first sight some aspects of this project seem to be too complicated. The complicatedness here comes from the author’s wish to achieve full flexibility of the project, independance of the output data from the final topology of the system and most of all – the need to gain compatibility with future versions of the Configurator as well as compatibility of the future versions with the currently projected.

The full text of the Graduation Paper is available only in Bulgarian language and consists of two documents: Graduation Paper (PDF, 926K), appendix (PDF, 213.6K) and source code (ZIP, 49.3K)