Who needs the Transient Procedural States

I always work on the principle that the recipe controller (that handles the control recipe) is a transaction based sequencing and data handling system. It can tolerate short delays. It is in effect the process operator; it cares little about the equipment provided it can do what the recipe asks of it. It can request the equipment to do some process action, then wait until it has.

 Basic control that drives the equipment is real time and cannot tolerate such delays.

The original Part 1 provides a lot of suggestions and some basic models that help to specify both the recipe and the basic control. And it shows how they can meet, via Procedural Entities.

 To interface the control recipe with the equipment, there must be EPE’s (Equipment Procedural Entities), typically phases, that actually execute the process action.

 But think about this – why should the recipe control have any real time capability other than being fast enough to avoid introducing significant delays?

If something happens that requires a quick response then it should not have to require data to propagate up and down the procedural levels of the Control Recipe, that will be slow  (and I have seen this cause problems,) and anyway it complicates the recipe procedure.

So, this leads me to my first objection to the Procedural State Transitions, and their extension in the Part 1 update and in Part 5.

Yes the Control Recipe may need to know whether an Equipment phase is running or complete but why does it need to know about Pausing, Starting etc?

Why do these transient states need to be exposed to the recipe?

 For example if we are running an equipment phase, as far as the world outside that equipment is concerned it is surely not of any value to know whether the equipment phase is Pausing or Paused. Once it is pausing or paused that is all the control recipe needs to know until it is running again. What the control recipe is supposed to do with that information is not defined – propagating modes to other objects maybe, but that should be only what is reasonable in Recipe Control – the real time stuff should be down in basic control. 

And I suspect that the transient states are really about the real time world.