Flexible and reliable software architecture for industrial user interfaces

Abstract

Visualization software plays a major role in controlling and monitoring production machines and facilities. In recent years these software systems have undergone major changes in terms of flexibility, user interaction and large scale enterprise integration capabilities. While traditional machine control systems tend to operate in isolation, modern industrial software systems are integrated in complex production processes that demand for flexibility and openness, also in terms of dynamic change of functionality at runtime. Despite this increased demand for flexibility, the most important requirement for industrial software systems remains reliability and stable operation. Within this work we present an architectural approach for abstracting industrial application models on top of a dynamic and modular runtime framework (OSGi) and a flexible application platform (Eclipse). This approach allows to add functionality at runtime as well as to adapt the rendering of the UI to various technologies.