Display Format Development Station

An interactive Display Format Development Station (DFDS) was created to generate, modify, and document static background graphic displays for use in process control and monitoring environments. The purpose of the system is to organize and simplify the display generation process in order to reduce the costs associated with this activity. A review of the display generation process was done in order to identify the types of graphics constructs needed to generate the graphics display screens. Since the system uses an interactive process to generate the displays, the human interface software was developed to take advantage of various user friendly methods of data entry, such as an intelligent terminal and a touch panel. Finally, the general structure of the database was developed based on the types of graphics constructs used and the type of data found in each construct