SCADA with fault tolerant CORBA on fault tolerant LANE ATM

The development of complex industrial distributed systems is highly benefited from distributed object computing middleware such as CORBA. Such applications demand a high degree of reliability, and need to be resilient to faults. The OMG has addressed these requirements as part of the fault tolerant CORBA (FT-CORBA) specification. The specification handles single point of failures in CORBA applications by redundancy, fault detection and recovery. This paper presents the building and evaluation of a FT-CORBA infrastructure based on a GPL licensed ORB. The infrastructure is a collection of CORBA services that provides fault tolerance to CORBA applications. Further, fault tolerance at the network card, switch and link level is added to increase system reliability. An evaluation of this infrastructure is done with a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system and fault tolerant local area network emulation (LANE) based asynchronous transfer mode (FTATM) network is presented.