Abstract :
The new LHC experiments at CERN have very large numbers of channels to operate. In order to be able to configure and monitor such large systems, a high degree of parallelism is necessary. The control system is built as a hierarchy of sub-systems distributed over several computers. A toolkit $SMI++, combining two approaches: finite state machines and rule-based programming, allows for the description of the various sub-systems as decentralized deciding entities, reacting in real-time to changes in the system, thus providing for the automation of standard procedures and for the automatic recovery from error conditions in a hierarchical fashion. In this paper we describe the principles and features of SMI++ as well as its integration with an industrial SCADA tool for use by the LHC experiments and we try to show that such tools, can provide a very convenient mechanism for the automation of large scale, high complexity, applications
Keywords :
SCADA systems; control engineering computing; distributed control; finite state machines; high energy physics instrumentation computing; logic programming; particle accelerators; particle detectors; LHC experiment; Large Hadron Collider; SMI++; application automation; automatic error recovery; distributed control system; finite state machine; industrial SCADA tool; rule-based programming; Automata; Automatic control; Automatic programming; Automation; Computerized monitoring; Control systems; Distributed computing; Distributed control; Large Hadron Collider; Parallel processing;
