A General Purpose Laboratory Facility Control Software Framework

A General Purpose Laboratory Facility Control Software Framework

This paper presents a software framework that allows the development of general purpose applications for facility control of quasi-static structural experiments in structural laboratories. Several important concepts and entities were identified and represented by abstract classes which can be specialized to achieve high extensibility. Some well-known design patterns such as Singleton, Adapter, Proxy, Observer, Strategy, Template Method, were implemented in the framework to achieve high extensibility and maintainability. The proposed software framework supports various types of quasi-static structural experiments, including cyclic testing, pseudo dynamic testing, push-over testing, profile play-out testing, and collaborative networked testing. The framework was designed also to support various actuator control systems and data acquisition systems. Moreover, it provides an easy task to add new monitoring widgets or analysis tools in the application by simply adding new inherited classes.