Acumen: a distributed environment for the integration of object oriented control systems

Acumen is a collaborative research project whose goal is to define the requirements of an applications platform which will support the integration of software products in process and manufacturing industry thereby enhancing the useability and effectiveness of such products. A prototype applications platform is produced and demonstrated. The object oriented paradigm has been adopted throughout the project, with P. Cood and E. Yourdon´s (1991) methodology being used for analysis and design. The applications platform itself is implemented in C₊₊ in a Unix environment. The authors described the basic architecture of the applications platform and discuss some of the constraints upon its design