An evaluation space for open architecture controllers

Existing open architecture controllers have different architectures and methods for realization, but none of them have been generally accepted or been widely applied in industry. Moreover, there is little literature that analyzes and compares these different open architecture controllers synthetically. So this paper establishes an evaluation space for open architecture controllers, a new method to analyze and compare the different open architecture controllers. The evaluation space enables the full evaluation of the open architectures and can easily find the controller’s advantages and disadvantages. The evaluation space for open architecture controllers is a multidimensional space, whose dimensions can be categorized as the requirement dimensions and the architecture dimensions. The requirement dimensions define different requirements of the open architecture controllers, and the architecture dimensions define the different realization methods of open architecture controllers. Establishing the relationships between the requirement dimensions and the architecture dimensions, the evaluation space can calculate the degree to which the different architectures meet the requirements of open architecture controllers, and then the integrated evaluation of different open architecture controllers can be obtained. Several typical open architecture controllers, such as NGC, OSACA, OMAC and OSEC, are compared based on the evaluation space; some valuable conclusions have been drawn.