System and method for emulating multi-tasking pipelines in a single tasking environment

摘要

A control system emulates a multi-tasking environment using a single tasking processor A number of predefined tasks are provided in a task library. When a host application (120) needs processed data from a data source (12), the host application (120) creates a pipeline (40) of initialized instantiations of one or more of the tasks (40A,40B,40C) from the task library. When the host application (120) invokes the pipeline (40), the data request is made from the host application (120) to a downstream-most section (40C) of the pipeline. The data request ripples upstreamwardly to the upstream-most instantiation of one of the tasks (40A) from the task library. The upstream-most instantiation of a task obtains data from a data source (12) and returns it downstreamwardly to the host application (120), each instantiation of a task from the task library further operating on the data.