Overview of the TJ-II remote participation system

The TJ-II remote participation system (RPS) is focused on providing remote access to elements that depend exclusively on characteristics of the TJ-II environment: data acquisition, diagnostics control systems and TJ-II operation tracking. Four key points were taken into account prior to starting the software design: access security, software execution platforms, software maintenance and distribution and delivery of operation events. The first, access security, was addressed by means of a distributed authentication and authorization system, PAPI. Regarding the other points, the development was based on the use of web servers (due to their standard character, flexibility and scalability) and Java technologies (due to their open nature, security properties and technological maturity). Software deployment was prepared to make use of the Java Network Launching Protocol (JNLP). On-line message distribution was planned according to a message oriented middleware. At present, the TJ-II RPS manages over 1000 digitization channels and 20 diagnostic control systems. The TJ-II RPS architecture is flexible, scalable and powerful enough to be applied to distributed environments and, in particular, it could be used in the ITER environment.