The Use of Object-Oriented Techniques and CORBA in Astronomical Instrumentation Control Systems.

Control software for astronomy matches the ever increasing complexity of new large instrumentation projects. In order to speed the development cycle, object-oriented techniques have been used to generate loosely coupled software objects and larger scale components that can be reused in future projects. Such object-oriented systems provide for short development cycles which can respond to changing requirements and allow for extension. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) has been used for the analysis, design and implementation of this software. A distributed system is supported by the use of an object broker such as CORBA. These techniques are being applied to the development of an instrument control system for the UK spectrograph within FMOS (Fiber-fed Multi-Object Spectrograph). This is a second generation instrument for the Subaru Telescope of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan