Research on the problems of creating effective control and diagnostic systems allows us to single out the following areas: development of the theory and methods for diagnosing and predicting the strength and reliability of structures, theoretical and experimental studies of fracture processes and the corresponding changes in characteristics and parameters, i.e. carriers of information about the processes occurring in the material during destruction; creation of information-measuring systems designed to register and analyze the information necessary to resolve the issue of the state of the structure; development of software for measuring equipment, including not only the main programs for generating and processing incoming information, but auxiliary subroutines that provide information compression, increase the reliability of measurement results, defect recognition, decision making. The article is devoted to the methods of acoustic-emission control of metal structures and the development of a computerized system for its implementation. The basics of organizing a software-algorithmic system for locating and processing acoustic emission signals are considered, including: methods for discretizing models of sensors and acoustic emission signals, which make it possible to obtain computational schemes such as a digital filter that provide effective algorithmic implementation; description of fragments of an experimental software-algorithmic system for processing acoustic emission signals, illustrating the principle of constructing software tools in an arbitrarily chosen computing area, the structure of the software organization of computational processes for locating an acoustic emission signal, which ensure the construction of the corresponding subsystem of a computer complex for acoustic-emission control, both in single-antenna and in a multi-antenna version.