M. Bubak et al. (Eds.): ICCS 2004, LNCS 3036, pp. 523–526, 2004. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004 CORBA-Based Open Platform for Processes Monitoring. An Application to a Complex Electromechanical Process Karina Cantillo 1 , Rodolfo E. Haber 1,2 , Jose E. Jiménez 1 , Ángel Alique 1 , and Ramón Galán 3 1 Instituto de Automática Industrial – CSIC, Campo Real km 0.200, Arganda del Rey, Madrid 28500 {cantillo, rhaber, jejc, a.alique}@iai.csic.es 2 Escuela Politécnica Superior. Ciudad Universitaria de Cantoblanco Ctra. de Colmenar Viejo, km. 15. 28049 - Spain Rodolfo.Haber@ii.uam.es 3 E.T.S. de Ingenieros Industriales, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, c/ José Gutiérrez Abascal Nº2, Madrid 28006. rgalan@etsii.upm.es Abstract. The goal of this work is to develop an open software platform called SYNERGY, supported by portable, low cost and worldwide-accepted technologies (i.e., Real Time CORBA), focused on networked control systems. Preliminary results of SYNERGY corroborate the viability for networked control, supervision and monitoring of complex electromechanical processes like high speed machining (HSM), on the basis of current communications and computation technologies upon open architectures. 1 Introduction During the last decade, successful applications of distributed real time systems have grown considerably due mainly to the availability of new standards and open architectures based on distributed objects (e.g., middleware Common Object Request Broker Architecture CORBA). Indeed, the combination of these technologies with the current control and supervision techniques based on classical and Artificial Intelligence paradigms are the foundation for the development of the new generation of networked control systems (NCS) [1,2,3]. In order to deal with communication constraints in NCS, has increased the use of CORBA, which is structured in layers, ORB core, services and the application layer, easing the development of distributed applications [4]. This paper is organized as follows. The main characteristics of TAO (CORBA implementation) are shown in section 2. A brief description of HSM process is presented in section 3. The design and implementation of SYNERGY software platform and results concerning networked real-time monitoring of HSM process are presented in Section 4. Finally, some conclusions and remarks are provided.