Reactive visual design and control of distributed industrial instrumentation systems

Existing visual engineering environments for design and control of reconfigurable industrial instrumentation systems tend to overlook the importance of the present-day heterogeneous distributed computing infrastructure. In this paper we define a virtual distributed instrument (VDI), over a computer network, as a collection of process interface devices, data acquisition and processing software modules, and a central virtual front panel (VFP). The complexity of the VDI visual design and control is tackled by decoupling the technique of programming individual task modules from the technique of configuring modules into a complete instrumentation system and the VFP design. The task module design is still based on the low level programming paradigm, while the VDI configuration and the VFP design is based on a novel, multifaceted, graphical editor, and an underpinning distributed application manager (DAM). The paper sets out the basic principles adopted in the VDI design and control, and analyses some specific system constraints.