AN OBJECT ORIENTED FRAMEWORK FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF DISTRIBUTED CONTROL APPLICATIONS

Software industry increasingly faces today the challenge of creating complex custom-made Industrial Process Measurement and Control System (IPMCS) applications within time and budget, while high competition forces prices down. A lot of proprietary solutions address the engineering process, and evolving standards exploit the function block construct as the main building block for the development of IPMCSs. However existing approaches are procedural-like and they do not exploit the maximum benefits introduced by the object technology. In the context of this paper, new technologies in Software Engineering that assist in improving the efficiency of software development process are considered. An Object-oriented framework is defined, to improve the engineering process of IPMCSs in terms of reliability, development time and degree of automation. This framework embodies an abstract design capable to provide solutions for the family of distributed IPMCSs. It will attempt to increase reusability in both architecture and functionality by addressing issues such as interoperability and integrated development of distributed IPMCSs.