I am a functional safety engineer for industrial plant and equipment and this exactly what I do for designing the sequencing and safety systems for large fired

I am a functional safety engineer for industrial plant and equipment and this exactly what I do for designing the sequencing and safety systems for large fired equipment. Either single FSM or a hierarchy of them when there is multiple burners. I wrote myself a package using PyQt that sort of looks like a special spreadsheet that allows the combustion engineers to specify and also simulate the logic on a scan by scan basis. The supporting logic "engine" is actually so simple as to be effectively 4 bitwise ops on bit packed words, per state (I use Mealy machines so the outputs are coupled directly and synchronously to states). Bonus is first up alarms and whats holding you out from next state all come for free in the logic used and you can derive a bunch of test cases automatically. The sim/spec tool could export code ready to import to the controller, but we haven't had the economies of scale to support the required generalised tool testing this would require, but it does generate a bunch of hex codes that are the "configuration" that controls the functionality, interpreted by the 'engine' A bunch of other bonuses, it allows you collect notes in a rich text doc behind every transition or condition cell and it can export these to make an easier to read human readable spec, it has an OPC server so you can couple it up to a HMI and do some basioc training or simulation demonstration, or you can bolt it onto an existing machine and see how well it "shadows" it if you are doign a retrofit or brownfields job. The improved quality of outcomes and traceability etc (all the good engineering things desireable) yielded by an executable specification has increased by at least an order of magnitude by having a tool of this nature. Previously most systems like this were effectively done by specifying with a "crappy narrative". This usually entailed, at best, a collection of vague thoughts about some things that were wanted, and some things that weren't, often some in conflict, and a not mentioning a bunch of negelected things. You then rolled the dice on the programmer and hoped they knew enough to ask the 3000 needed questions to somehow come up with adequately coded functionality. New tool is way, way better. A final note, a joke I am sure most of you know, about why English is a poor specifying language and the sort of thing that drove me to take this path (with English it's all about assumed context) A wife asks her husband, a software engineer, "Could you please go shopping for me and buy one carton of milk, and if they have eggs, get 6!" A short time later the husband comes back with 6 cartons of milk. The wife asks him, "Why the hell did you buy 6 cartons of milk?" He replied, "They had eggs."