This dissertation demonstrates how object-oriented technology can support the development of software that has to meet the requirements of high performance distributed data acquisition systems. The environment for this work is a system under planning for the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN that shall start its operation in the year 2005.
The long operational phase of the experiment together with a tight and puzzling interaction with custom devices make the quest for an evolvable architecture that exhibits a high level of abstraction the driving issue. The question arises if an existing approach already fits our needs. The presented work casts light on these problems and as a result comprises the following novel contributions:
We conclude that state-of-the-art middleware cannot meet the required efficiency of the planned data acquisition system. Although new tool generations already provide a certain degree of configurability, the obligation to follow standards specifications does not allow the necessary optimisations. We identified the major limiting factors and argue that a custom solution following a component model with narrow interfaces can satisfy our requirements. This approach has been adopted for the current design iteration of the experiments on-line software subsystem. A scheme for a configurable on-line application control framework is presented as well.