Serving the data needs of multiple applications with one data source—an industry application case study

Automation of a technical process involves the feedback of sensor data for the automated control of particular aspects of the process itself. The same feedback data can be used for other applications such as health monitoring of systems or to update a graphical user interface or to analyze process performance. In order for this data to be utilized effectively, a system architecture must be designed to provide such functionality. This architecture must accommodate the dependencies of the system and sustain the required data transmission speed to ensure stability and data integrity. Such an architecture is presented in this paper, which shows how the data needs of multiple applications are satisfied from a single source of data. Also it will show that the flexibility of this architecture enables the integration of additional data sources that can be used to protect the performance of applications that consume the data as the order of data dependencies grows. This research is based on the development of an integrated automation system to test fuel controls for civil transport aircraft engines.