AROMS: A Real-time Open Middleware System for controlling industrial plant systems

Middleware system in industrial plant system is important for offering independence of platform complexity and transparency, reusability, and flexibility in terms of moving one control system to the others. This paper presents a real-time open middleware system (AROMS) for controlling industrial plant system. AROMS is a middleware integrated with general-purpose real-time platforms for industrial plant control and automation and operates on standard hardware and operating systems. Moreover, AROMS adopts a classical modular and layered design consisting dynamically-loaded processes and threads. For the purpose of performance evaluation of AROMS, we first implemented AROMS in HP-UX systems and evaluated AROMS in terms of asynchronous message communication speed in real pilot-test field. The performance evaluation results show that AROMS provides very reliable message transportation mechanism and it can be easily expanded into real industrial plant systems.