Xfcsim : an xml based, highly flexible, generic control system simulation toolkit

Abstract EN

Control system simulation became an essential part in control engineering in order to test the control system prior to implementing it in hardware.

Since control engineering is a multidisciplinary subject, certain areas may require high flexibility in the simulation toolkit.

This paper introduces a new XML-based, highly flexible, generic Control system Simulation toolkit called XFCSim.

The toolkit is implemented to be a generic control system simulation engine.

The C# programming language has been chosen for the implementation of the toolkit.

The toolkit is designed to provide flexibility not presented before in most of the available control system simulation toolkits in a direct way (without the need to write scripts or special program code).

The ultimate goal of such flexibility is to permits change of parameters value during simulation, provides a global scope for all the variables in the control system, allows any block parameter to be expressed as a mathematical expression of the variables in the system, and permits the use of the output signal of any block in the parameters of any other block.

This gives more freedom to the control system designer and provides an easy solution for many control system design problems in fields like missile guidance, control and navigation.

Also the toolkit support a new XML schema [7] (called Control XML) that provides a generic way for describing any arbitrary control system using extensible markup language (XML).

This new XML schema has been developed in companion with the toolkit and is introduced in another paper.

The flexibility inherited in XFCSim has no negative impact on the simulation accuracy as deduced from the simulation results in comparison with MATLAB 7.0 / Simulink 6.0 toolkit simulation results.