You have been retained as a Software Engineering consultant to the Muddy Springs Bottled Water Company. The company runs a water bottling plant which is currently undergoing dramatic improvements in equipment and capacity. As part of these improvements an Automated Monitoring and Control System (AMAC) is being developed as specified below. Your job is to oversee development of the real-time software required for the AMAC.
AMAC will allow a single plant operator to oversee and control all aspects of the plant's operations from a central control room.
To achieve this AMAC requires new leading-edge telemetry and control facilities.
Below is schematic diagram of the plant.
The bottling plant consists of two integrated systems: the water supply system and the bottle washing, storing and filling system. The water supply system pumps the spring water from the holding reservoir to a special header tank which supplies water to both the bottle washing and filling plants. The header tank must operate within a narrow band to supply the correct pressure to the filling plant. New bottles arrive at the washing plant and are cleaned and rinsed to ensure strict quality controls are met. After cleaning the bottles are transported via conveyor belt (C1 on the schematic) to the bottle storage facility. The bottles are then supplied to the filling plant by the conveyor C2 as required.
The AMAC system will be the hub of the overall system with all data, control and display functions directed through AMAC to the appropriate external devices. The operator's console consists of a mimic board and control panel which exist within the operators room. You can consider the mimic board and control panel as external entities for your analysis. All information displayed on the mimic board and all operators control panel inputs are channelled through AMAC.
A more comprehensive description of the system is presented in section 3. This includes all the data measured and stored in the system along with all control functions required.
1. An External Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) indicating relationships of the AMAC and the other external entities in the system. Note you do not need to include attributes of the entities on the ERD. Just the relationships and their cardinality and modality.
2. Data and Control Flow Diagrams (DFD/CFDs) - to sufficient detail that only a single task is carried out by each process at the lowest level. You should show the control events that occur on the same diagrams. Use the real-time extensions for control flows etc shown in the lecture notes on slide 17 from week 3. You need to determine when and where events will occur. For example, whenever a piece of data becomes available it may need a control event to let the system know that it is available. These events must be clearly shown in these DFD/CFD diagrams and then handled in the CSPEC.
3. Process specifications (Pspecs) - a psuedo-code or similar design language specification is required for each process at the lowest level. Note a narrative description alone will not be considered sufficient.
4. Control Specifications (Cspec) - use combinational or sequential FSMs as required, presented in an appropriate format. The idea is that the Cspec will completely describe how each and every event or control flow is handled in the system. Note you need to provide both "Process Activation Table" and "State Machine Diagram". .
5. A Data Dictionary is required to adequately describe each name or special term used in the analysis, note this includes process names, data flow names, control flow names etc.