Decoupled Data-driven and Event-driven Architecture Sample Clauses

Decoupled Data-driven and Event-driven Architecture. ‌ The COCOP system architecture strives for scalability and enabling extensive utilisation of data either as refined information or as massive amounts of raw data. One of the main drivers is also decoupling the producers' information from their consumers through a centralised bus or - depending on the implementation - a pool of queues for data and events. The event-driven approach comes from the requirement for reactive actions possibly also in real-time. In some cases, the end of a process step may trigger the start of another. For instance, when a batch of process finishes, it may enable the execution of another process step for that particular piece of material. From a performance point of view, scalability is achieved by removing redundant queries to low-level systems and by having a centrally managed bus architecture in between producers and consumers of information and data. A centralised message bus allows for efficient scaling, caching and managing access independent of the consumers and producers. From a systems integration point of view, a centralised bus provides uniform access to the data thus reducing engineering effort for the plant-wide control applications. A centralised bus, however, can introduce a single point of failure, and additional preventive measures might be needed to ensure reliability, e.g., through redundancy or in restrictions how plant-wide monitoring and control applications are required to operate in case of manual intervention. This kind of architecture benefits especially the development of new plant-wide monitoring and control applications in a platform-like development framework. From a development perspective, the burden is on integrating existing systems with a multitude of different communication interfaces to the bus and the event-driven approach. For this the development of adapters is needed to make heterogeneous interfaces compatible. With an adapter an existing system is wrapped behind a compatible interface as it is not intended to replace existing control systems but to integrate them into the new (COCOP) control environment. Also, a full replacement would be expensive and create a significant hurdle towards implementation in plants, as it would imply the installation of new systems with new, unknown risks with potential production losses.