Developing a communications architecture based on WCF for use in nuclear power plant simulators

Communications play the main role in the development of system architectures where their different parts have to continually exchange data. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) has been designed to offer a manageable approach to distributed computing, broad interoperability and direct support for service orientation. It allows the communication among systems from any platform across intranets, extranets or the Internet, supporting at the same time a safety and reliable service. This paper presents the use of WCF in the context of distributed nuclear power plant simulators. In these simulators, communication plays a main role since they are intrinsically distributed systems. We have defined a communication architecture for the simulators using WCF for the data exchange between the different applications that compose the simulator. We also present an application developed with Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). This application uses our architecture, developed with WCF, to communicate with a simulator. It has the appearance and behaviour of an Excel sheet together with some new added features and it allows us to test the communication architecture.