Industrial Automation Using OLE

Often, industrial automation software is a single monolithic program that must handle all aspects of control, data gathering, architecture, and reporting. Design of such software is time consuming and error prone. Furthermore, maintenance or modifications to the code is difficult and can “break” other functions. A more powerful approach is to use the multiprocessing capabilities of Windows95 along with the interprocess communication provided by ObjectLinking and Embedding (OLE). Using OLE, the functionality of other Windows applications can be used as building blocks for your own applications without the overhead. For example, a container application and its user interface can be developed in Visual Basic. Microsoft Excel is ideal for organization and analysis of data, thus it could perform any “number crunching”. Similarly, Microsoft Word provides the mechanisms necessary to edit, format, and print documents, so it would be ideal for report generation and printing. Often, in industrial automation, software must interface to hardware to monitor and control machinery. OLE lends itself nicely to this requirement through the use of OLE controls (OCXs) developed in Visual C++. Similar to device drivers, OLE controls can be easily customized to external hardware and utilized in software. In this fashion, hardware control is easily integrated into a Windows application. Furthermore, OLE is a great educational tool because it modularizes the application at hand. This allows a number of students of differing skill levels to take part in program development. With using OLE as a software building tool, development, management, and enhancement of software is drastically simplified. Likewise, software is less prone to errors and less time is spent in development.