The SFC's have been chosen due to their popularity in control system design, visual graphical format, emerging standard definition, and explicit representation of parallelism. During the simulation the user is allowed to interact with the FB's. This is desirable in order to test for the fault coverage of the control software. Views of FB dynamics are provided with an animation capability.
Animated pictures can display their state in a visually sensible form.
The execution of SFC's is also animated. The ultimate aim of the tool is to translate the control software FB's into the appropriate low level language and then downloaded to the actual controllers. The processes that occur on the factory floor and their interfaces. Simulation Council Inc. Figure 17 shows how the software control model is directly linked to the physical process model via the control points.