ABSTRACT
The history of using computers in control system design can be traced as far back as the late 1940s when simple electronic analog computers were used to simulate servomechanisms for gunnery control and radar tracking. The necessity for graphical system modeling tools was addressed by Barker and Linn in 1979. Though similar software had been available for some time in electrical and electronic engineering, civil engineering, and mechanical engineering, numeric modeling methods dominated almost all software in control engineering before 1984. In creating a control system, the control engineer must construct models for the dynamic system that is to be controlled, analyze their behavior, design appropriate control strategies, and evaluate the overall performance. The development of computer-aided control system design has already provided a range of software tools for numerical analysis and simulation of linear and nonlinear, continuous and/or discrete control systems.
