Design and implementation of an engineering database system for process-control applications

Abstract

Computers are becoming more widely used in a large number of the complicated scientific applications such as aerospace and defense systems, nuclear reactor control, and computer integrated manufacturing(CIM) with their ever-increasing performance-price ratio. These applications require not only complex scientific processing/analysis but also real-time processing for their data to control external devices correctly. For such kind of applications, a database management system(DBMS) should support various characteristics such as the satisfaction of timing constraints, the management of both current data and their history, and the support of statistical analysis and a user-friendly interface. Databases managed by such DBMS are called cell controller databases. In this thesis, we propose a real-time database system which satisfies timing constraints required in cell controller databases. The proposed real-time database system is designed by integrating two approaches, i.e., the main memory database approach and the feature optimization approach. A new storage structure and an access method suitable for the main memory databases are developed in order to support real-time processing. In addition, a concurrency control protocol and a recovery technique are proposed to meet the requirement of real-time processing in cell controller databases. The management of temporal data is another major characteristics of cell controller databases. In this thesis, a multi-level index structure and a summary table for temporal databases in the cell controller environment are newly designed in order to decrease the time to access temporal data and to reduce the amount of data stored. We experimentally implement the proposed cell controller database system which supports a user-friendly interface and statistical analysis as well as real-time processing and the management of temporal data under a multiprocessor tested running Unix System V, VMEexec real-time environment and X window sy...