A novel object-oriented environment for distributed process control systems

This paper addresses the design, development and implementation of distributed process control systems. A novel object-oriented environment is presented that supports the development lifecycle phases. The core of this environment is the integrated design notation (IDN), which is based on the unified modelling language (UML). Its emphasis is on open architectures and thus it uses open standards such as UML (for software engineering), IEC 61131-3 (for process control) and SIMULINK (for control engineering). Automated translation of models and languages across the different disciplines is created with the IDN. Also, the source code implementation phase is produced in Java, thus achieving greater portability for control systems.