Using UML for the development of distributed industrial process measurement and control systems

Software industry increasingly faces today the challenge of creating complex custom-made industrial process measurement and control systems (IPMCS) within time and budget, while high competition forces prices down. A lot of proprietary solutions address the engineering process and evolving standards exploit the function block construct as the main building block for the development of IPMCSs. However, existing approaches are procedural-like and they do not exploit the maximum benefits introduced by the object technology. In the context of this work, new technologies in software engineering as well as modern CASE tools, which assist to improve the efficiency of software development process, are considered. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) was adopted for the definition of a notation to assist in the design and development of open distributed IPMCSs. The proposed notation constitutes the heart of our object-oriented framework that attempts to improve the engineering process in terms of reliability, development time and degree of automation.