A LabVIEW based experiment execution engine to ease the development of ISA batch lab servers

This paper describes the work carried out at the Carinthia University of Applied Sciences to create a LabVIEW based toolkit that aims at providing laboratory developers with a tool to easily develop new batch lab servers for the iLab Shared Architecture. The Toolkit was developed for the ELVIS batch lab server of MIT, but can be used as a general solution for any type of iLab batch Lab Server deployed with LabVIEW at the server-side. The development platform was LabVIEW due to its widespread use in engineering schools. The Toolkit implements the fuction of an experiment engine that parses an experiment specification XML document, executes the experiment and generates an experiment result XML document. The XML parser implemented in LabVIEW can be easily adapted by lab developers by configuring the parameters to be parsed via a LabVIEW front panel. Furthermore the toolkit validates the parsed parameters and passes them to the lab specific VIs.