Process simulation coordination using software component technology

The co-use of process simulation systems together with process and automation design tools, operator user interfaces and control systems is becoming more and more important. At the same time these systems are opening up providing more flexible ways to implement the links between the systems. A big part of this opening process has been the transition to the PC based platforms especially to the Windows NT world. For example OPC (OLE for Process Control) specification has given a standard way to access the data and handle events in these systems. On the other fields of simulation people are using more distributed architectures than in process simulation. This may be due to the hard task of dividing the simulation problem into pieces and still doing the calculations and communication fast enough. One good example of object oriented distributed simulation standard is HLA (High Level Architecture) specified by the department of defence in USA. This standard is applied mainly for military simulations, but provides also a very interesting general approach for distributed model coordination. The main motivation for this seminar work is on the other hand to discuss about the requirements for the system distribution and coordination in process simulation field, but also to study the possible implementation technologies and related specifications in the Windows NT platform. With software component technology we refer here to the DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) the basics of which are introduced in the Chapter 2.