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 computer implemented supervisory control and data acquisition system for managing distributed field devices that control or monitor physical or logical entities, the field devices having attributes representative of states of the entities, comprising:

• at least one virtual application service including:
• a communications gateway communicatively coupled to selected ones of the field devices to receive real time data from the field devices, the real time data formatted according to a communications protocol associated with the field devices, the communications gateway converting the received real time data to standardized real time data in a standard data format independent of the field devices that specifies for each item of real time data a content and source of the real time data;
• a plurality of application cells, each application cell coupled to the communications gateway to receive the standardized real time data for at least one of the field devices and apply an inferencing operation thereto to produce derived real time data;
• an object server communicatively coupled to the plurality of application cells to receive the derived real time data and to store the derived real time data in a plurality of data objects, each data object having attributes corresponding to attributes of a field device;
• and
• a personal agent framework including:
• a least one service agent representing an instance of virtual application services, each service agent communicatively coupled to the object server of the virtual application service to receive derived real time data of a data object in response to the data object being updated by an application cell;
• and
• at least one personal agent, each personal agent including at least one presentation cell, each presentation cell providing a graphical representation of a field device that is dynamically responsive to real time changes in the attributes of the field device, each presentation cell communicatively coupled to at least one service agent to receive from one of the coupled service agents the derived real time data, and mapping the derived real time data to an output graphical representation.