• M. Eguiraun
  ESS-Bilbao, Zamudio
• I. Arredondo
  ESS Bilbao, Bilbao
• I. Badillo, J. Jugo
  University of the Basque Country, Faculty of Science and Technology, Bilbao

The use of dis­tribut­ed con­trol sys­tems for im­prov­ing con­trol sys­tem's per­for­mance is a hot re­search topic. Thus, the im­por­tance of de­vel­op­ing con­trol sys­tems across net­worked en­vi­ron­ment is ris­ing, a lot of re­search is fo­cused on de­vel­op­ing mid­dle­ware based so­lu­tions. On the other hand, EPICS is an ex­tend­ed con­trol sys­tem mid­dle­ware, which is based on TCP/UDP pro­to­col. This pro­to­col has non-de­ter­min­is­tic char­ac­ter­is­tics, lim­it­ing its use for net­worked con­trol sys­tems. De­spite of these char­ac­ter­is­tics, the in­ter­est on TCP based net­works in in­dus­tri­al field has been in­creas­ing due to its ad­van­tages in cost and easy in­te­gra­tion. In this work, EPICS as a net­worked con­trol sys­tem is an­a­lyzed in order to de­vel­op strate­gies to im­prove its per­for­mance. For this pur­pose, an EPICS based net­worked con­trol scheme is pre­sent­ed, where con­trol loop is closed over the net. As op­posed to usual way of work­ing with EPICS, two IOCs are used lo­cat­ed in dif­fer­ent hosts. The first one per­forms data ac­qui­si­tion, while the sec­ond one cal­cu­lates the con­trol sig­nal. The anal­y­sis and con­trol per­for­mance study of such scheme is pre­sent­ed by using pe­ri­od­ic sam­pling, as well as event based sam­pling ap­proach.