System Development Platform
What is Catalyst™?
Catalyst™ is a growing suite of applications developed by As One, focused on making real-time manufacturing operations more efficient. The foundation of the Catalyst™ suite of products is Catalyst SDP™, our System Development Platform. Catalyst SDP™ combines three powerful concepts into one software product: a composite application development framework, unifying service architecture and distributed execution capability. Catalyst SDP™ dramatically simplifies software and system development for manufacturers, system integrators and OEMs/ISVs, allowing them to quickly and easily integrate highly disparate manufacturing systems and address a variety of application needs within the manufacturing environment.
Composite Application Development Framework
Catalyst SDP™ provides a visually intuitive environment for the assembly of applications from highly configurable, prebuilt software components called Agents. Agents are autonomous, compiled units of functionality. Agents communicate on a peer-to-peer basis with each other and when assembled together provide a desired functionality. Catalyst SDP™ comes with a rich and growing number of prebuilt Agents which provide access to commonly used functionality, connectivity to popular database (Oracle, SQL, OleDb) and communication protocols (OPC, Tibco, MSMQ, TCP, FTP, Serial) as well as highly configurable Agents such as State Machine Builder, Rules Builder, and C# Scripter. Catalyst SDP™ provides wizards and templates for MS Visual Studio that allow users to easily develop their own Agents using standard .NET tools and languages.
Unifying Service Architecture
Services form the foundation of system architecture. Catalyst SDP™ promotes a service-based approach to system development, allowing for the modular development and connectivity of functionality. Services formalize and generalize the interactions between functional components of a system. They also help isolate change and allow for the controlled extension or reconfiguration of systems. This dramatically reduces system complexity while increasing maintainability and flexibility. Implementing standardized services provides a common approach to integration between manufacturing operations and enterprise systems. It also addresses the high level of diversity found in manufacturing operations as well as the demands of unique implementations.
Distributed Execution Capability
Manufacturing operations generate significant event and data volume, simply moving this information to a database for future analysis is an ineffective strategy. Catalyst SDP™ allows for the distribution of execution capability to the source of event and data generation where control, state, data models can contextualize this information in real-time. Contextualized information can be provided, through services, to manufacturing operations concurrently. It also enables peer-to-peer interaction, creating a much more responsive and intelligent manufacturing operation.
