Design of interface software for a distributed system with mixed varied intelligent meters

Main problems of the common Communication Interface Software (CIS) for an industry-control network based on RS485 bus are poor openness, flexibility and stability, so some functions of intelligent meters are limited. A new CIS was designed by the folio-wing ways: the RS485 serial communication process was composed of physical and application layers; the interface initializing process related to communication at physical layer was described by normalized communication module; the common parts of order message creation and responsive message transmission were described by a data structure and the special parts of them were described by text files respectively; configuration software was used to interpret these descriptions. The software has characteristics of broad generalization and operational facilitation, and can run on Windows completely. The results in application cases show that the software is effective and feasible'