Designing a portable architecture for intelligent particle accelerator control

We present a portable system for intelligent control of particle accelerators. This system is based on a hierarchical distributed architecture. At the lowest level, a physical access layer provides an object-oriented abstraction of the target system. A series of intermediate layers implement general algorithms for control, optimization, data interpretation, and diagnosis. Decision making and planning are organized by knowledge-based components that utilize knowledge acquired from human experts to appropriately direct and configure lower level services. The general nature of the representations and algorithms at lower levels gives this architecture a high degree of potential portability. The knowledge-based decision-making and planning at higher levels gives this system an adaptive capability as well as making it readily configurable to new environments