A real time, object oriented fieldbus management system

Communication between networked PCs and fieldbuses require the availability of a real time operating system to access and control external object variables. Since the majority of commercial and factory PCs in use today are based on one of the flavours of Windows (95,98,NT), it is essential that such real time features provide a seamless interface between a fieldbus and other communicating media, and the Windows operating system. Furthermore, Windows offers powerful object oriented features, which can be used for internal communication between PC applications, be these spreadsheets, databases or visualisation programs such as SCADA, and is known as OLE2 Antomation (Object Linking and Embedding). If the real time enhancements can also utilise OLE technology, a completely transparent path between fieldbus objects and PC applications can be achieved.