Aspect orientation and object orientation of control application code for distributed control systems in TORERO

The application of distributed control systems is one of the main trends in current automation. Here, besides the programming of the control application code and its functional allocation to specific devices, an important point is the implementation of communication related code to exploit the underlying communication platform and realise the collaboration of the distributed control application code. Due to the real-timeliness and even time-criticality of control applications, the correct handling of realtime constraints has to be considered. This paper presents two approaches for integrating communication related code into distributed control application code. One integration method is based on the application of AspectJ, an extension for aspect-oriented programming with Java, and the other method is based on ordinary object orientation applying standard design patterns. This work is part of the research project TORERO, which was funded by the European Commission under the IST program