A cooperative simulation mechanism of distributed control systems based on object-oriented design patterns

Distributed control systems (DCSs) consisting of a plant, a controller composed of many devices, and an open network interconnecting devices, are now used in many automation areas. For assuring the control performance under the heavy traffic on the network, the simulation of DCS is strongly needed. In the case of DCSs for controlling a mechanical plant, the graphical and cooperative simulation between the controller model and the plant model becomes important to verify the sequence of motions of the plant. For this purpose, we propose a systematic object-oriented-based DCS modeling procedure to efficiently and uniformly develop the DCS simulation model. From this procedure, we can describe the formal description of DCS simulation model based on five object-oriented design patterns which describe the structure and behavior of the DCS. We also propose an event chain mechanism between the statechart-based controller model and the graphical plant model. Finally, the cooperative DCS simulation software is developed by using the Java 3D API.