Virtual laboratory: an object-oriented framework

This work aims to experiment with the concept of a virtual laboratory-a measurement framework wherein the user is capable, through simple graphical user-interface (GUI) operations, of performing in a safe way all the steps occurring in a traditional measurement system: selecting the test method, selecting the involved instruments, configuring the instruments and the associated device drivers, executing the test method, analyzing the measured data and so forth. To these basic features an improvement is added concerning a verification of configuration data, especially for detecting instrument mutual compatibility problems. Virtual laboratory implementation is centred on a concurrent and real-time object-oriented software lifecycle. The selected GUI system is that of Windows 3.1. The paper exemplifies the application of the proposed architecture to a measurement example