Application management in a distributed, object-oriented condition monitoring and maintenance planning system

Summary form only given. The authors address the problem of the management of distributed condition monitoring applications. The MARIA research project has developed a toolkit for the design, debugging, implementation and reconfiguration of an application, together with run-time support for inter-object message passing. In a MARIA application all system components from data acquisition, through diagnostic KBS to maintenance scheduling are treated as objects, their internal structure being hidden behind a standardised, message-based interface. This allows a separation between the structure of the monitoring system and the implementation of its component objects, thus promoting the re-use of standard components and the facility for replacing any object with an updated version with an identical interface. The toolkit consists of the Workbench, the Instancer and the run-time system written using Objective-C, X-Windows and remote procedure calls. The Workbench provides graphical facilities for the development and validation of an application specification. Application management facilities are provided by the Instancer, also a graphical tool, which takes an application specification from the Workbench and uses it to create, reconfigure or shut down an instance of that application on the chosen hardware