In mechanical system control, portability has consequences both for product lifetime and for the design development cycle. The mechanical part of the system can have a commercial lifetime of anywhere from 5 to 20 years. On the other hand, the computational technology used for its control only has a lifetime of 3 to 5 years. To remain competitive, new versions of the product need to use new computers to take advantage of ever-increasing computational capability. Doing this effectively requires software that can easily be "ported" from
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