I am looking for an aid/tool to allow process persons describe the process on a spreadsheet/word document etc. From this an application engineer can write an FDS or plc code.

Anybody know of such an aid?

 

Hi,

Are you looking for a text-based narrative description of the process, ("first you do this, then you add that ...") or a graphical flow-charting approach?

The former obviously lends itself to a process person's language, but can generally be very unstructured, ambiguous, repetitive, contradictory or have parts missing: not good as a basis for coding! The latter is a better foundation, but why not try to get the "process person" involved quite closely in the whole design process? Many process control systems use sequential and continuous function charts to configure the operations. Get the process guy to help sketch these out to his requirements. If you get him/her involved, he will have a much higher degree of 'ownership' of the system when it goes live and he will want his investment in time and effort to be seen to have been productive. I've seen examples in the past where operations and production staff simply wash their hands of new systems saying "That's what we were given - it's not what we would have done!"
There's no need to get down to the nitty-gritty of assiging I/O or addresses or even variable names with the Process Person. But how about getting Process Person to write the documentation for the SFCs or loop diagrams *before* the coding is done. That way you make sure that the code is then written to match the documented requirements, rather than the documentation being done afterwards simply to justify the code, right or wrong.

So I would suggest trying to bring process experts further in to the engineering area and getting them to contribute there. Teach them some rudimentary sofwtare design skills (not coding) rather than introduce a new set of software as yet another link in the chain.

Just an idea!

Regards

Ken.

 

Greetings!

I would suggest their using a Flowcharting program (SmartDraw PRO 6.0 is really great!) so that they and you can easily see that all logical steps are covered before you start coding! Changes also are more easily integrated into the Flowchart first to avoid "gotcha's" later.

Carson S. Meyers
[email protected]