METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR THE CREATION OF PERSONALIZED SUPERVISORY AND CONTROL DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEMS FOR THE MANAGEMENT AND INTEGRATION OF REAL-TIME ENTERPRISE-WIDE APPLICATIONS AND SYSTEMS

A system and method provide for the creation and operation of real-time enterprise-wide, personalize supervisory and control data acquisition systems. Personalized SCADA applications are constructed from a virtual application service and a personal agent framework using simple drag and drop operations or other high level action. The virtual application service includes a communications gateway that communicates with disparate and non-interoperable systems and external field devices to communicate low level time data collected from such systems into the application environment transforming the collected data in a single common data format. The virtual application service includes application cells that receive the reformatted data and process it to provide high level analysis and context, storing the processed data in an object server. The object server provides a unified, hierarchical object model for all of the data received from the underlying devices and systems. The virtual application service communicates with personal agent frameworks containing presentation cells and service agents. The service agents are representative of the virtual application service, and provide the personal agent framework with access to the object server to receive and send data from the object server to the presentation cells. The presentation cells subscribe to the object server's data objects via the service agent. Presentation cell provide a graphical representation and mapping of data objects and hence underlying devices and systems, to allow a user to manage and control such systems.