Home // International Journal On Advances in Internet Technology, volume 6, numbers 1 and 2, 2013 // View article

Supporting Adaptive Flexibility with Communications Middleware

Authors:
Dirk van der Linden
Georg Neugschwandtner
Maarten Reekmans
Wolfgang Kastner
Herbert Peremans

Keywords: Automation; OPC UA; Profiles; Scalability; Diversity; Modularity; Reusability; Evolvability; Normalized Systems.

Abstract:
Automation systems are continuously growing in scope and size. To keep them maintainable (despite their ever-increasing complexity), structures, methodologies and technologies with the capability of responding to diverse and changing requirements are required -- a quality we call adaptive flexibility. After presenting highlights from a survey illustrating the variety of requirements, this paper discusses two approaches to supporting adaptive flexibility as well as the relationship between them. The first is OPC Unified Architecture (UA), a communications middleware standard. The second is the Normalized Systems Theory, a formal approach to ensuring systems evolvability. The paper intends to bridge the gap between theory and practice by highlighting several aspects of OPC UA that support adaptive flexibility, with this analysis being based on the concepts of Normalized Systems as far as possible.

Pages: 12 to 31

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2013. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2013

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2652