Inheritance and polymorphism in real-time monitoring and control systems

Most recent researches into an object oriented design approach for the development of real-time Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) applications have concentrated on object identification and object classification. These techniques, however, may only be considered as an object-based paradigm. In the true object-oriented paradigm, object characteristics such as data encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism must also be considered. This paper introduces a design paradigm for developing a SCADA system through the true object oriented design methodology. To complete the design, a hierarchical object-oriented design (HOOD) tree is used to map the physical shop floor layout to a logical layout for formulating the basic object hierarchy. The active components and control logic in the SCADA models are manipulated by a newly derived script language called CONTROL-C++ proposed by the author. To verify the proposed model, a newly designed software system is implemented and justified in terms of system completeness and soundness.