Design of an Object-Oriented Framework for Measurement Systems

Abstract Measurement systems are of increasing importance for manufacturing, due to high automation level of production processes. Although most measurement systems have much in common and are expensive to construct, these systems are often developed from scratch, hardly reusing the available designs and implementations. To address this, we have designed and implemented an object-oriented framework for the domain of measurement systems that can be used as the core of measurement systems. Although the framework has not been through so many iterations, evaluations of it show that it captures the main concepts in the domain and that the required extensions for individual applications are limited. In this paper, a number of example framework instantiations are presented. The lessons we learned during the framework design and an evaluation of the object-oriented modelling paradigm are presented.