IMPLEMENTATION OF IEEE 1451.1 USING ACE FRAMEWORK - REALIZATION OF A RECONFIGURABLE NCAP

Abstract

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Technical Committee on Sensor Technology of the IEEE's Instrumentation and Measurement Society have been working on the development and support of IEEE Standard 1451 on Smart Transducer Interface for Sensors and Actuators, focusing on defining a set of common communication interfaces for connecting smart transducers to field networks in a network independent environment. IEEE 1451.1 - Network Capable Application Processor (NCAP) Information Model, a member of the family, was established to define a common object model and interface specification for the components of networked smart transducers. An object-Oriented application framework is a promising technology for verifying proven software designs and implementations in order to reduce the cost and improve the quality of software. The Adaptive Communication Environment (ACE) is a freely available, open-source object-oriented (00) framework that implements many core patterns for concurrent communication software pair. This dissertation report describes an object-oriented application framework for NCAP. The four-layered framework consists of the operating system layer, middleware and tools layer, the 1451.1 layer, and the application layer. The 1451.1 layer focuses on the class hierarchy of 1451.1 standard, and consists of the neutral model and the middleware-based 1451.1 model. The neutral model includes operations of all class definitions in the IEEE 1451.1 standard. It is based solely on the 1451.1 standard specifications and is neutral to any network and middleware. The neutral model has been established using Umbrello, a Unified Modeling Language tool (UML tool) and Eclipse, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The neutral model can be mapped into the ACE-based 1451.1 model using ACE middleware. The ACE-based 1451.1 model can be modified to make it suitable for multiple networks and/or middleware to obtain a framework of Reconfigurable NCAP. IEEE 1451.1 application developers can use this framework to customize their specific applications.