M&C ML: A modeling language for monitoring and control systems

The use of System Engineering (SE) language such as SysML [1], [20] is common within the community of control system designers. However the design handoff to the subsequent phases of the control system development is carried out manually in most cases without much tool support. The approach to agreeing on the control interface between components is a good example where engineers still rely on either manually created Interface Control Documents (ICD) or one off tools implemented by individual projects. Square Kilometer Array (SKA) [2] and International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) [3] are two good examples of such large projects adopting these approaches. This results in non-uniformity in the overall system design since individual groups invent their own vocabulary while using a language like SysML which leads to inconsistencies across the design, interface and realized code. To mitigate this, we propose the development of a Monitoring and Control Modeling Language (M&CML), a domain specific language (DSL) [4], [22] for specifying M&C solutions. M&C ML starts with defining a vocabulary borrowing concepts from standard practices used in the control domain and incorporates a language which ensures uniformity and consistency across the M&C design, interfaces and implementation artifacts. In this paper we discuss this language with an analysis of its usage to point out its benefits.