Object brokering

The real issue within the production environment is the transfer of various object data between applications. What is required is some sort of "object broker" or object management mechanism (OMM). This mechanism effectively handles multiple objed models it converts them into a common format that can be successfully transferred between various applications and then be reconstructed at the other end. 

This is the main difference between emerging solutions and the standard solutions of the 1990s. Although some form of bespoke interface may still be required to translate a particular data format and protocol to an object model, once this is developed, the resultant data are then available to all other users via the "object broker". 

The use of a common object broker extends the advantages of object-oriented software and makes the practical integration of open applications much easier to engineering, test, validate and maintain. 

Where object brokering is used as a standard part of the system and the interfaces between the Fieldbus and the laboratory analysis system and the object broker have been both previously validated, there should be no need to fully validate the application as a bespoke one-off solution. This may be the case even if these two sets of devices have never been connected in such a manner before. 

Therefore, so long as any given interface to the object broker has either been fully validated by testing or by acceptance of the installed base, applications may be linked via the object broker and treated as standard product. This can significantly reduce the need for the full testing of interfaces and allows new combinations of interfaces to be made without application testing at the module level. 

Systems already exist that provide true plant-level integration through the use of a object brokers. The ability of these systems to provide full integration in the future relies upon the development of suitable standard object broker interfaces to the large number of existing de facto standards that currently exist. It is, however, unlikely that specific interfaces will be written for many devices and systems that use less popular protocols. 

Modern communications are much more transaction based (a trend developed in the commercial and business sector), and these are less suited to traditional control system interfaces. Control systems have traditionally operated on a real-time basis, polling for data on a routine basis or being interrupt driven by alarms and events. These traditional systems are not well suited to transactional-based communications, and the use of object broker interfaces will overcome some of these problems. The new object-oriented interfaces will again be easier to validate since the object broker interfaces will be configured rather than programmed and will use standard software blocks to build the interfaces. 

Whilst this was theoretically possible in the past, it may now be achieved in a manner that uses standard products and tools and is therefore easier and less expensive to validate. The use of common databases and engineering tools also means that project costs may actually be reduced when an integrated approach is taken. Emerging communications standards such as Fieldbus and deterministic Ethernet will be quickly and fully integrated through the use of object brokering. 

The most interesting aspects of design involve partial descriptions of a group of objects and their interactions. For example, a trading system might involve a buyer, a seller, and a broker. Their behavior can be described in terms of their detailed interaction protocols or, more abstractly, in terms of a single high-level action, trade. 

CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) was designed by the Object Management Group (OMG) to support open distributed communication between objects across a wide variety of platforms and languages. Interestingly, despite the Object in its name, CORBA does not directly expose the notion of object identity it could more properly be considered a distributed component framework. 

Other cycles can be horizontal one that does not deliver new user-visible functionality but instead carries a minimal use case through increasingly deep layers of the application and infrastructure components, exercising all communication channels. An example is a single user interaction carried from the user interface through the business object layer via an object request broker (ORB) to the applicable databases and back. 

CORBA] Common Object Request Broker Architecture. See www.omg.oig. 

One of the drawbacks of JADE framework is that it does not support Ml mobility of agents. By default, JADE agents communicate with each other using Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI, [5]) or Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA, [6]). However, a mobile agent can be created and it can travel between hosts within the same agent platform but not between different platforms. Currently, there is a research work on going to enhance JADE to support mobility between different agent platforms. 

The problem is too important to let our scientific egos get in the way. There needs to be an honest broker (i.e., objective group of scientists) who can recommend an honest representation of the strategic investment for energy. 

The management system relies on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) to deal with the problem of heterogeneity. CORBA is a prominent example of a distribution platform [877]. The CORBA architecture consists of five functional areas [1024] ... 

Object Request Broker (ORB), which is responsible for transparent communication between objects, i.e. clients and servers,... 

It should be noted that different concrete architectures for one logical architecture exist in general. These may reflect a sequence of possibly different interdependent decisions of the above list, or different realization variants. For example, one concrete architecture may be equipped with a RPC and another one with a CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture [877]) implementation of interprocess communication. 

Object Management Group (OMG) Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) Core Specification, Version 3.0.3 (2004), http //www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/corba iiop.htm... 

Needless to say, there are other ways to exchange data like the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) (15). This standard provides an intermediary object-oriented layer that handles access to the data between server and client. Another recently emerging way to exchange data is web services (16), which will be described later. 

Otte, R., Patrick, P., and Roy, M. (1996), Understanding CORBA Common Object Request Broker Architecture, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ. 

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