OSAI: A Component-Based Open Software Architecture for Modern Industrial Control Systems

ICS (industrial control system) has gone through constant evolution in both hardware and software with the growing complexity of control applications. The generalization for these control systems has been a trend, and the hardware platform for ICS is getting multifunctional. Therefore, it is necessary to apply methods and technologies from the general software domain to handle this. CBSE (component-based software engineering) can promote reusability during software development and decouple the system with scalability. Existing component-based methods for ICS lack support for advanced function with modern technologies, and traditional software architectures are not flexible enough and usually vendor specific, which brings difficulties to system integration. In this paper, we propose an Open Software Architecture for Industry based on a novel component model. The motivation is to provide a component-based method for ICS and an open framework for various application parts and multi-vendor cooperation. We concern about three aspects including reusability, openness, and flexibility. Meanwhile, a flexible runtime architecture for the component model that supports isolation and real-time performance also matters. We also implement a simple real-life case based on the component model and software architecture we design and evaluate real-time and communication performance.