Adopting a Component-Based Software Architecture for an Industrial Control System – A Case Study

This chapter presents a case study from a global company developing a new generation of programmable controllers to replace several existing products. The system needs to incorporate support for a large number of I/O systems, network types, and communication protocols. To leverage its global development resources and the competency of different development centers, the company decided to adopt a component-based software architecture that allows I/O and communication functions to be realized by independently developed components. The architecture incorporates a subset of a standard component model. The process of redesigning the software architecture is presented, along with the experiences made during and after the project. An analysis of these experiences shows that the component-based architecture effectively supports distributed development and that the effort required for implementing certain functionality has been substantially reduced while, at the same time, the system’s performance and other run-time quality attributes have been kept on a satisfactory level.