Engineering components for flexible and interoperable real-time distributed supervision and control systems

The new requirements of modern real-time distributed supervision and control systems such as more flexibility, interoperability, and cost savings, have motivated the use of software-intensive solutions both in academia and industry. Following this trend we have presented, in a previous publication, the design rationale and implementation issues of a flexible and reusable software platform (ARCOS) that relies on the CORBA component model (CCM/CIAO), the DAIS (data acquisition from industrial systems) standard, and framework technologies. This paper builds on this previous publication by presenting a new assembly tool that allows for the visual component-based implementation of ARCOS-based systems and the automatic generation of the related CCM/CIAO/ARCOS artifacts. To demonstrate the power of such a tool, two example applications are presented.