| Abstract |
The system software architecture of the distributed control computer (computer network) of the mechatronic scientific facility (crystallizer) for automatic high temperature material processing in a orbital space station in micro-gravitation environment is presented in this paper. The scientific facility consists of the multi-zone high temperature furnace with heating system, PWM controlled heating converters, the precise extra low speed vibration-less electric drives to make possible to manipulate the processed material samples during experiments, very precise temperature measurement module, telemetric channel, crew interface computer, free programmable central controller and several further units. Facility computer network nodes have many user tasks (processes) divided into many threads running in real time environment. Using preemptive real time operating system tends to have unacceptable high overhead therefore the system of table driven coroutines with low system resource requirement (overhead, stack space) was designed. Emphasis is given on the design of efficient, reliable and self documented scheduler-dispatcher of the user tasks with minimized overhead and easily extensible descriptors of table driven user finite state automata. Presented scheduler architecture is used in the distributed network control computer of newly designed facility (Advanced TITUS) intended to be placed in the ISS space station. It is advanced version of the proved software utilized in the distributed control computer of the TITUS scientific equipment which was successfully operated several years in the MIR orbital station especially during ESA missions EUROMIR. |
