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 8 - Overview

8 Overview

Practice is the best of all instructors. In Part II, we present the development of a collection of industrial automation systems for various practical industrial applications. By studying these real-world applications, the reader learns the cutting-edge technologies used to build modern industrial automation systems and, most importantly, learns the philosophy for constructing different industrial automation systems to satisfy the ever-tighter industrial requirements in a variety of real-world production and manufacturing scenarios. Nowadays, the concept of automation does not refer only to the conventional plant automation anymore. It has been widely extended to the higher levels of enterprise decision support systems such as optimal production management, robotic online negotiation, and so on. Part II discusses a bunch of industrial applications ranging from industrial measurement, supervision, and control systems to advanced decision support systems in modern enterprises. These industrial automation systems turn out to be highly effective in their respective real-world applications. In Chapter 9, an object-oriented industrial measurement and control system is discussed; it is built based on the reconfiguration concept. Therefore, it turns out to be highly flexible and can be applied to a wide range of application situations. Chapter 10 presents the flexible measurement points management in the industrial supervision systems. The measurement points management scheme is able to make the software more flexible by enabling it to accommodate a variety of hardware devices from different vendors. It lays the solid foundation to construct a flexible industrial system as data collection is its most bottom layer. Then in Chapter 11, a VxD-based blending system is built with the major components of industrial computer and programmable logic controller. To avoid the data transmission bottleneck in the presence of a large volume of real-time data, the multithreaded programming technique is used. A flexible automatic test system is reported in Chapter 12, which is used to ensure the reliable operations of rotating turbine machinery. The system integration mechanism is illustrated in this application. With the wide acceptance of Internet technology, networked industrial automation system has become a trend in different industrial applications. In Chapter 13, an Internet-based online real-time condition monitoring system is discussed, which is able to provide continuous supervision of large-scale rotating machinery. Although it is not possible to report all the applications in the Part II, the readers may be able to develop their own industrial automation systems for their specific requirements by utilizing the design philosophy discussed in the following chapters. Also, this book ends with an introduction of some emerging technologies which are being adopted or may be adopted to improve the developmental efficiency as well as the functionality of modern industrial automation software.

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Preface

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 8 - Overview

8

Overview

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