hich provide a lower level of distribution and allow the device drivers to exist ona puter from the controller. At ics, we currently support approximately 100 device instances of30 device types which are distributed across 10 integrated systems. System Management An OSCAR system isa named collection of device instances which is logically represented in the database. The interface for each device (commands and parameters) is stored in the database along with the configuration settings for each device instance (i.e., COM port, capacity). The System ponent provides the functionality to easily manipulate this information (given appropriate permissions). When a physical device is moved from one system to another, ora processing bottleneck alleviated by addition of another similar device, system