Supporting independent development, deployment and co-operation of autonomous objects in distributed control systems

Autonomous, active components like smart sensors and actuators offer the capabilities of spontaneous behaviour, concurrent computations and well-defined communication interfaces. The perspective of building a system from such active blocks however has an impact on modeling and deployment of the components and supporting their interaction at run-time. The paper presents a modeling approach for dynamically interacting autonomous objects addressing the problems of independent development, deployment and incremental extension. Compared to related approaches our concept further complements the modeling by an adequate middleware that supports the abstractions of the model during run-time and performs the respective dynamic binding and co-operation between objects. This opens a wide range of possibilities for dynamically integrating hardware and software components and support virtual sensors and actuators.