Towards building reusability in control systems – a journey

Development of similar systems leads to a strong motivation for reuse. Our involvement with three large experimental physics facilities led us to appreciate this better in the context of development of their respective monitoring and control (M&C) software. We realized that the approach to allowing reuse follows the onion skin model that is, building reusability in each layer in the solution to the problem. The same motivation led us to create a generic M&C architecture through our first collaborative effort which resulted into a fairly formal M&C domain model. The second collaboration showed us the need to have a common vocabulary that could be used across multiple systems to specify respective domain specific M&C solutions at higher levels of abstraction implemented using the generic underlying M&C engine. This resulted in our definition and creation of a domain specific language for M&C. The third collaboration leads us to imagine capturing domain knowledge using the common vocabulary which will substantially further reuse, this thought is already demonstrated through a preliminary prototype. We discuss our learnings through this journey in this paper. (author)