Abstract: A scientific experiment control system includes a main controller for high-level control, an experimental manager for lower-level control of scientific experiments, and a roll-up engine for automatically propagating modifications (or “changes”) within the system to ensure consistency across the system and instruments which are linked to it in an automatic and dynamic manner. When any of experiment control objects automatically detects a change event as defined by any of the metrics inherited from the metric objects it transmits a notification to an interface. The latter automatically instantiates a change event object, which is managed in a queue by an input interface of the roll-up engine. The roll-up engine automatically interrogates the network of objects contained in the program object to determine the identity of every object in the hierarchy down to the notifying object which is involved in performance of the current experiment run.

Abstract: A system (1) has a server (2) linked with PC clients (5), in turn connected to test equipment (10). A design-of-experiment (DOE) engine (20) generates a series of run objects (21), each defining a variation of an equipment run. The inputs to the DOE engine (20) are a selected procedure object (25) and experiment variations. The engine (20) automatically determines all task objects (26), resource objects (27), and parameter configuration objects (28) linked with the selected procedure object (25). The variations may be variations in the hierarchical links and/or different values for the parameter configurations (28). There is a run object (21) associated with each variation permutation.