Event-based communications for equipment supervisory control

Event-based approaches are becoming more and more popular for building large scale distributed systems and applications, especially in the Internet environment. In this paper, the concept and techniques of event-based communications are first discussed. A hybrid approach of event-based communications for real-time manufacturing supervisory control is then proposed together with an "event-based communication agent" (ECA) framework to provide extendable and reliable communications, as well as efficient development method in multi-OS, multiple types of network protocol environment. A case study involving an industrial implementation for a large-scale distributed supervisory control system based on this approach is then discussed