  The ALICE experiment will be able to detect open charm and beauty hadrons in
proton-proton and heavy ion collisions in the new energy regime of the CERN
Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Heavy flavours are a powerful tool to investigate
the medium created in high energy nucleus--nucleus interactions because they
are produced in the hard scatterings occurring at early times and, thanks to
their long lifetime on the collision timescale, they probe all the stages of
the system evolution. The detectors of the ALICE central barrel ($-0.9 < \eta <
0.9$) will allow to track charged particles down to low transverse momentum
($\approx$ 100 MeV/$c$) and will provide hadron and electron identification as
well as an accurate measurement of the positions of primary and secondary
vertices. It will therefore be possible to measure the production of open heavy
flavours in the central rapidity region down to low transverse momentum,
exploiting the semi-electronic and the hadronic decay channels. Here we present
a general overview of the ALICE perspectives for heavy flavour physics and some
examples from the open charm and beauty analyses which have been developed and
tested on detailed simulations of the experimental apparatus.
