Elements of a Procedure

You can construct procedures using one or more of the various components, such as Capabilities, Transitions, Loops, and Branches, that are available to the editor.

Capabilities

A Capability represents, by the design of the Equipment, an instance within one or many pieces of Equipment. Though a Capability is versioned, it does not require formal approval before it is used in production. Capabilities can have many Capability parameters.

For more information on Capabilities, refer to the Capability Management.

Transitions

Transitions are procedure elements (control) that can be dropped into a Procedure to evaluate conditions associated to the Equipment used.

A procedure can include multiple individual transitions. Transitions are also built into Loops and Execute One branches with specific behavior associated with them. A transition requires an alias name that is unique within a procedure, a description, and an expression. The expression is a logic statement that is built using available variables and operators and evaluates to a true/false condition at runtime. The available variables consist of Equipment Variables (defined in Equipment configuration and linked to I/O). You can also provide static values (e.g. 35.8, true, “allocated”).

Evaluating Equipment conditions through Transition logic enables you to manage the procedure execution by redirecting the processing of a procedure based on the result of a Boolean expression or making adjustments to parameters, as applicable.

For more information, refer to Transitions.

Loops

Loop controls enable you to re-run Capabilities based on an evaluated transition logic expression.

You can insert a loop control into a procedure sequence. Any procedure controls, including other loops, can be placed inside a loop structure. Insert objects within the loop by positioning the cursor on the objects within the loop or the loop transition. The bottom part of the loop object contains a transition object that you must define with the Expression Editor. The result of the evaluation of the expression determines whether the controls contained within the loop are re-run or not. If the expression is True, loop processing returns to the top of the loop. If the expression is False, processing proceeds below the loop.

For more information, refer to the Loop Controls topic.

Branches

Branch controls enable you to run simultaneous sets of Capabilities.

You can insert a branch control into the respective procedure sequence at the current location of the cursor. Use Branch controls to process multiple Capabilities at the same time or to make a choice between running one of the several Capabilities. The number of branch controls that you can use in a procedure is unlimited.

For more information, refer to the Branch Controls topic.

Branch Leg

Branch leg enables you to add new leg within an existing branch.

For more information, refer to the Branch Leg topic.