The paper presents an object-oriented approach to the development of real-time industrial automation applications. The approach covers all developments phases, from requirements engineering, through hardware and software design, to implementation. The paper discusses strategies for structuring the software and hardware components of industrial automation applications using real-time active objects. Such a structuring approach allows a better representation of the application world at a high level of abstraction. Besides the system's timeliness, special emphasis is put on aspects such as maintainability, and extensibility. In order to enhance the paper's comprehension, the automation of a modular production system based on an industrial field bus is used as an example.
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