Application structure

ModFrame consists of a server and a client which runs independently of each other. The client connects to a server and configures it, but it can be closed without affecting the server's computations.

Servers perform the actual computations, and several servers can run on different machines and share the computational load by passing data to each other through ApisHive's OPC mechanisms. Data from an external I/O system will also typically be retrieved from ApisHive.

The client, as opposed to the server, has an advanced user interface (UI), enabling the configuration of the server as well as displaying current computational results. Several clients can connect to a single server, and configure or view results simultaneously.

The basic UI is a graphical process representation, where each process unit or computational unit (real or conceptual/functional) is represented by a graphical icon in a process graphics picture. For a chemical process part, this graphic representation may look like a simplified process flow sheet with computational units attached (controllers, optimisers, soft sensors).