Proposal of an integrated object-oriented environment for the design of supervisory software for real-time industrial automation systems

The object-oriented paradigm has been used extensively both in CASE tools for modeling and design of distributed real-time systems as well as in software tools for developing supervisory control systems. Supervisory tools are very useful in the context of real-time industrial automation systems. Recent researches prove that the use of object-orientation paradigm in the development of these systems tend to produce better-structured and more reusable programs. This paper analyses, using case studies, some of the widely used commercial tools for modeling and supervisory control generation. After that, some case studies using the analyzed tools are reported and finally a proposal of an integrated object-oriented environment for application development and monitoring is made. This work is part of an ongoing research project that has been developed at the Industrial Automation Lab. of Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil.