Brief overview of design principles

Control and Information System Designer (C&ISD or simply CISD) is a graphic modeling system. It is designated to ease and shorten the design time of any control and information system in field of industry control and automation. At the same time, chosen approach is challenged to clarify every part of potentially complex model and therefore minimize occurrence of errors in model design or implementation. 

CISD uses Modern structured analysis (MSA - founded by Edward Yourdon) as its core methodology. It was slightly enhanced of useful features of Object oriented modeling approach and some features that imply from the practice of control system design. All of these principles resulted in the set of diagrams, upon which CISD’s special purpose editors operate. 

A typical lifecycle of a control system development is shown on the picture 1. The green diagram elements embody the development phases that are covered by CISD functionality. 

Basic steps in the development cycle are supplied by single, specific purpose editors, which present the 7 essential parts of the CISD system. In the part of lifecycle that CISD covers, we distinguish an Analysis, Design & Implementation and a Testing phase. 

The editors are tools, which bind the building elements into a consistent model. There may be various kinds of building elements needed in several stages of project development. To be open to wide range of requirements, which may occur after the deployment of this product, CISD allows developers to implement custom elements and consequently use them in the model. Therefore, the current version of CISD comes with basic set of elements only, that have been discovered essential in project design and several custom ones, which make the sample project clearer and understandable.