UNICOS A FRAMEWORK TO BUILD INDUSTRY LIKE CONTROL SYSTEMS:

UNICOS is a CERN framework developed to produce control applications for three-layer industrial control systems (Fig. 1). UNICOS provides developers with means to develop full control applications and operators with ways to interact with all items of the process from the most simple (e.g. I/O channels) to the high level compounded objects (e.g. a sub part of the plant). In addition UNICOS offers tools to diagnose the process and the control system. UNICOS proposes a method to design and develop the control applications. This method is based on the modelling of the process in a hierarchy of objects (I/Os, actual devices and more abstract control objects). These objects are used as a common language by process engineers and programmers to define the functional analysis of the process. In addition to the method, tools have been produced to automate the instantiation of the objects in the supervision and process control layers and generate skeletons of the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) programs. The control code production associated to this methodology is generally data-driven and for some projects a model driven software production has been implemented