The Distributed Control And Automation Framework (DCAF) is a collection of open-source software components that support the design and development of control applications with the LabVIEW graphical system design environment, including the LabVIEW Real-Time and LabVIEW FPGA modules.
Control applications are characterized by the need to aggregate and handle a lot of different data from multiple sources including local measurement hardware, distributed I/O over industrial communication links, and enterprise systems using various network protocols. Inline data processing and analysis such as scaling and alarming, as well as control algorithms and other business logic, is deployed to the various processing nodes of the system.
DCAF has evolved from previous successful frameworks including the Tag Bus Data Framework (TBDF) and the Machine Control Reference Architecture (MCRA). It includes a number of new features and interfaces to provide an application template that is easy and fast to deploy for simple automation applications, but also very flexible and extensible to handle complex distributed control systems.
DCAF is offered free under a permissive open source license and is a community-driven project. Additionally, due to the increased success and adoption of DCAF, NI officially added support for the DCAF core in October 2017. NI support includes a regular release cadence, R&D bandwidth, and bug fixes to the DCAF core.