The Development of the Ulstein Control Platform as a Fully Configurable and Distributed System Cultivating the Internet of Things Philosophy

Abstract

A robust development platform is important for effective development of systems that require a minimum of maintenance. This project originates from Ulstein Power and Control AS's (UPC) wish to renew the Ulstein Control Platform (UCP) so that it is capable of handling future demands and requirements.

The previous version of UCP uses Control Design Platform (CDP) by ICD Software as its back-end. CDP was proven to be unsuitable for use in future, more complex products. As a consequence, Ulstein needed a new state of the art platform utilizing suitable technologies.

This report describes the new version of the UCP. It is developed using the RTI Connext (DDS) communication platform and Qt framework as the main building blocks. This new version of UPC is a prototype, which future products will benefit from. The platform is event based, light weight, distributed and utilizes technologies that are widely used. One of the key features in the new system is the use of smart bus couplers. The bus couplers run a Linux distribution. This makes it possible to run smart applications that communicate using DDS.

The results reveal that the new UCP uses a small amount of resources and has low latency when operating the UCP features. The report concludes that this new version of the UPC is more suitable for future products than the old version. It is also concluded that it is easy to add functionality, since the new system is distributed and the applications consist of self contained objects which act on events in the system.