REACT: An Object-Oriented Control Engine for Rapidly Building Control Systems

The cost to develop real-time systems is still quite high, and off-the-shelf solutions are often difficult to adapt to many actual real-world problems. As part of joint research at the University of Guadalajara and the University of Colima in Mexico, an object-oriented control engine has been developed to enable quick creation of real-time systems with limited involvement of programmers and control experts. This system is based on control objects, and standard objects have been developed for analog and discrete inputs and outputs, PID control, and many others. There is an extensible object-oriented scripting language that is extended when objects are added, with the source code for the linkage of script functions to a member function being generated automatically. All script functions are executed on react control objects or on react system object. This allows control systems to be created by configuring standard control objects and then using the object-scripting language to write sequences. If standard object types with scripting language are not sufficient for a particular control problem, it is quite simple to add custom object types that are loaded at run-time. We illustrate the use of REACT through a pumping station where it solves the control problem, the monitoring problem, the alarming, and also handles the required reporting and display generation. This research is partially supported by grants from ANUIES.