PIMPA: A Tool for oPtImal Measurement Probes Allocation

The magnetic diagnostic system plays a crucial role in a Tokamak reactor and, more generally, in any magnetically confined fusion device. Indeed, all the essential quantities for plasma control are computed by a number of processing nodes, starting from the magnetic fluxes and fields acquired by this diagnostic system. This paper presents the tool for oPtImal Measurement Probes Allocation (PIMPA) in a magnetic diagnostic system. PIMPA is based on the solution of an integer linear programming problem, and aims at maximizing the reliability of the diagnostic system against the failure of one or more of the processing nodes. Although in this paper, PIMPA is introduced for the optimal allocation among the processing nodes of the magnetic probes, it can be easily extended to any diagnostic system. A case study that considers a distributed and scalable architecture for the ITER Tokamak is presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.