Learning's from Developing a Domain Specific Engineering Environment for Control Systems

Large projects such as Square Kilometer Array comprise of distributed teams developing parts of the control system. To exchange design thinking early in the development life cycle, teams use SysML based tools to capture design in a structured form. Since SysML is unaware of the application domain it is unable to reason about these designs created across teams. Based on our experience with such projects, we created a domain intelligent environment that significantly enhances the support towards the design and development of control systems. This environment is centered on a Domain Specific Language (DSL). The design of the environment as well as the DSL is influenced by multiple factors. In this paper we discuss these factors and their influence on the design rationale. We believe these factors could be generalized and reused to design environments with similar goals.