The goal of the Process Control software is to create an easy-to-use, powerful, scalable process control system. Process Control can be used to increase quality and efficiency of any process where feedback process control is useful. Feedback process control is useful in virtually every industry, but primarily in manufacturing and other industries where physical products are produced.
Process Control depends on the simple interactions of just a few entities within your production system. A fundamental concept within Process Control is a Job. A Job models some work that is to be done by a Processor. When a Processor receives a request to perform some work, it should create a Job and submit it for control to the Process Control system. The Process Control system will then execute a control strategy to optimize the parameters of the Job for execution by the Processor. Once the Processor completes the Job, a Measurer should measure how well the Processor executed the Job. Having measured the job's quality, the measurements should be submitted back to the Process Control system for use by control strategies in subsequent jobs.
The initial state of a job submitted for control is New. Once a control strategy has been executed for the job and it is ready to be returned to the processor, the job's state will be transitioned to Controlled. If a problem occurs while processing the job, the processor should update the state of the job to Aborted. When processing is successful, then measurements should be taken and submitted to the Process Control system along with a state of Measured. Typically, a control strategy will only use job history from jobs in the Measured state.
The Archived state is used to indicate that the job should no longer be used in control strategies. This state is useful in cases where some change to the process or processor has taken place and thus the previous job history is no longer useful for control of new jobs.
The Process Control system will enforce the execution of this state model. For example, a transition from Aborted to Controlled will not be allowed.
