OpenDREAMS II: Open distributed reliable environment, architecture and middleware for supervision II

• Research unit: EU RFP
• Project number: 96.0454

Key words (French)

CORBA; tolérance aux fautes; réplication d'objets; transactions; persistance.

Alternative project number (English)

EU project number: 25262

Research programs (English)

EU-programme: 4. Frame Research Programme - 1.3 Telematic systems

Short description (English)

See abstract

Partners and International Organizations (English)

Alcatel Alsthom Rech. (F), CISE (I), ENEL (I), Alcatel ISR (F), POET Software (D), Pol. Milano (I), Teamlog (F)

Abstract (English)

The OpenDREAMS II project aimed at defining and implementing an open interoperable platform that supports the design and development of distributed supervision and control systems (SCS). EPFL's efforts were concentrated on the level of middleware (CORBA), in particular on the services related to fault tolerance. In the last five months of the project, our role was partly devoted to support, consulting and maintenance, as the main focus was on the development of the applications (i.e., use of the infrastructure) and less on the development of the infrastructure.
The industrial partners started using the Object Group Service (OGS), our main software contribution. We had to package OGS, write tutorials and provide support for it.
We continued working on the integration of OGS with the other services of the OpenDREAMS infrastructure:
· We already provided a solution for integrating OGS with a CORBA locking service (CCS). A more general solution required adding to OGS the capability of communicating from object groups to single objects, and to object groups (as opposed to communication from single objects to object groups). Implementing this capability required some restructuring of the OGS code.
· New, more efficient solutions have been tried to integrate OGS with the Poet object database. This research effort will continue after the end of OpenDREAMS.

The OpenDREAMS project attained its main objectives: an integrated CORBA infrastructure and a development methodology for supervision and control applications.
To conclude, the project provided us with a lot of insight into the problems of combining replication with other abstractions, and applying the result in a realistic context.

References in databases (English)

Swiss Database: Euro-DB of the
State Secretariat for Education and Research
Hallwylstrasse 4
CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland
Tel. [phone]
Swiss Project-Number: 96.0454