Kaleidoscope: A Reference Architecture for Monitoring and Control Systems

Although monitoring and control systems can be applied to a great variety of application domains, they exhibit a number of common characteristics, particularly the extensive use of abstraction layers and information streams. This paper presents a reference architecture upon which a number of monitoring and control systems for a wide range of application domains can be designed. The architecture is described in terms of components and connectors, and the UML methodology is employed to specify class diagrams. The architecture is specifically conceived to be made up by reusable components; to that aim, a sharp separation is made between information components and strategic components, so that the former can be reused under different strategies. Conceptual images are information components which model concepts of the application domain, and are specialised in terms of concrete images, such as acquisition, processing, and presentation. The major task of the system is to align concrete images, which takes place via transfer of objects (facets) through particular connectors (projectors). This mechanism allows to have systems where very little is hard-coded at compile-time, and a lot is left to configuration, which can usually be performed by a domain expert rather than a software engineer.