Preface

This book contains significant results from our research on industrial automation software conducted in previous years. Industrial automation software can be used in a wide variety of industrial fields such as condition monitoring and fault diagnosis for rotating machinery, public utilities monitoring, plant process supervision, intelligent building management, and many others. With the fast development of computer technology in recent years, a number of emerging software technologies can be adopted to build more powerful industrial automation software. These innovative technologies include modern software engineering, object-oriented methodology, visual/graphical programming platform, graphical user interface, virtual instrumentation, component-based system, systematic database management, dynamic data exchange, and so forth. All these technologies provide new opportunities to develop more comprehensive and reliable software artifacts than before. Thus the demand for new books in this field arises as the field continues to keep evolving, and both practicing engineers and academic people are simultaneously challenged by how to develop industrial automation software in a more effective and efficient manner.

This book is intended to address how the industrial automation software can be developed in a purposeful and disciplined fashion. Broadly speaking, the whole book is divided into two parts. The first part provides the reader with an overview of this field and a variety of fundamental design principles. Chapter 1 introduces the modern industrial automation systems, virtual instrumentation technology is discussed in Chapter 2, and the development ofcomponent-based measurement systems is addressed in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 introduces the object-oriented software engineering. User interface design is discussed in Chapter 5. Database management is presented in Chapter 6. Software testing is fleshed out in Chapter 7. In the second part of this book, first an overview on the five typical applications in real-world industrial automation software design is given in Chapter 8. All of these case studies are highly representative so that they can serve as useful references when the reader wants to construct their own software systems. Chapter 9 represents an object-oriented reconfigurable software for industrial measurement and control. Because the reconfiguration concept is used throughout the software development process, the obtained software turns out to be highly flexible and able to accommodate different industrial application requirements. Chapter 10 focuses on the flexible measurement point management in the industrial measurement and control system. It provides the basis for building industrial automation systems with high configuration capability. A VxD-based automatic blending system is discussed in Chapter 11. To meet the communication speed in the presence of a large volume of data, multithreaded programming technique is used to avoid the data transmission bottleneck. Rotating turbine machinery is widely used in various industrial environments, and its design quality is of particular importance. Thus in Chapter 12, an automatic test system for turbine machinery is discussed, which is developed for ensuring the machine quality by automatic testing. Networked industrial systems are the development trend for different industry applications. In Chapter 13, an Internet-based online real-time condition monitoring system is discussed. It is developed based on the concept of modular design and functional decomposition. In the final chapter, the emerging technologies for building more powerful industrial automation software are introduced, which include middleware, Unified Modeling Language (UML), agent-based software development, and agile methodologies.

The authors welcome all the comments and suggestions regarding this book. All the correspondence may be addressed to the first author at l.f.wang@ieee.org. Thank you for reading the book, and I look forward to hearing from you.

L. F. Wang

College Station, Texas

K. C. Tan

NUS, Singapore

Modern Industrial Automation Software Design

By Lingfeng Wang & Kay Chen Tan

Chapter 6.1 - Database Systems

6.1 DATABASE SYSTEMS

A database can be thought of as a collection of associated files, and their connection style is determined by the database model used [1]. Two representative database models used in the early database systems are hierarchical model and network model. In the hierarchical model, files are associated with one another based on the parent/child structure. In the network model, files are connected based on the relationships between owners and members. After the 1970s, the relational database model was proposed and it soon became the most commonly used database model in practical applications. In the relational database model, files are related to each other through a common field, which provides high flexibility to the database model. Although in recent years certain emerging database models were proposed, the most widely used database model nowadays is still the relational database system. Its representative products include SQL Server, DB2, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and so on.

User interface: In the flat files, the file storage format and record structure should be known prior to accessing the data. In the database system, these details are taken care of by the database system so that users do not need to know about the exact file storage format and record structure in database operations. The user only needs to provide the nonprocedural SQL clauses, which state what kind of data the user wants to query. The database operations are conducted through the Database Management System (DBMS).

Concurrency control: Flat file does not support concurrency operations, which tremendously restricts the effective utilization of system resources. Database systems offer the concurrency mechanism. Therefore, multiple users can access the database simultaneously.

Data integrity constraints: As the data in the database are persistent and shared, the data correctness is of great importance. For instance, in the industrial automation software systems, nearly all of the monitored variables are physical parameters so they may have different units. In the database system, their data types and units can be explicitly defined and managed in a unified manner to avoid the possible errors.

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Chapter 6.1 - Database Systems

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