ASME - GREEK SECTION, First Nat. Conf. on Recent Advances in Mech. Eng., September 17-20, 2001, Patras, Greece 1 Proceedings of First National Conference on Recent Advances in Mechanical Engineering ASME INTERNATIONAL - GREEK SECTION September 17-20, 2001 Convention Center of the University of Patras, Patras, Greece ANG1/P020 AN OO FRAMEWORK FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF DISTRIBUTED CONTROL APPLICATIONS Kleanthis Thramboulidis Electrical & Computer Engineering Department, University of Patras, 265 00 Patras, Greece. E-mail: thrambo@ee.upatras.gr Chris Tranoris Electrical & Computer Engineering Department, University of Patras, 265 00 Patras, Greece. E-mail: tranoris@ee.upatras.gr ABSTRACT 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. KEYWORDS IPMCS, Object-Oriented framework, engineering support system, fieldbus. INTRODUCTION Today’s rapidly changing market requirements impose the need of improving the agility of manufacturing systems. The always growing need for innovative products, forces manufacturing plants to improve their ability to quickly respond to market demands by designing competitive products and modifying existing ones. Until recently, most of the Industrial Process Measurement and Control Systems (IPMCSs) have been based either on traditional distributed control systems or on programmable logic controllers. In both cases, the systems are composed of monolithic applications that are almost impossible to integrate and even to expand. Modularity, flexibility, extensibility, reusability and interoperability are dimensions slightingly addressed by many traditional proprietary engineering tools and products. Even more, the most of the traditional products and tools are far away from the new challenging technologies in Software Engineering. The IPMCS software industry increasingly faces today, the challenge of creating complex custom-made distributed control systems within time and budget, while high competition forces prices down. On the other hand, evolving standards, like IEC61499 and the more recent IEC1804 [2], define the basic concepts and a methodology for the design of modular, re-usable, distributed industrial process, measurement and control systems. They define, the function block construct as the main building block of IPMCS applications, in a format that is independent of implementation. They also define, the way that function blocks can be used to define robust, re-usable software components that constitute the distributed IPMCSs, and a methodology to be used by system designers to construct distributed control systems. This methodology allows systems to be defined in terms of logically connected function blocks that run on different processing resources. Complete applications, can be built from network of function blocks, formed by interconnecting their inputs and outputs. In a subsequent step the assignment of the application’s components into physical resources such as field devices should take place. As far as, the field devices are interconnected with the same fieldbus, the