Author: Dalesio, L.R.
Paper Title Page
S07IC03 EPICS Architecture 278
 
  • L.R. Dalesio, A.J. Kozubal
    LANL, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA
  • M.R. Kraimer
    ANL, Lemont, Illinois, USA
  
  Funding: Work at LANL supported and funded under the Department of Defense. US Army Strategic Defense Command. under the auspices of the Department of Energy.<br /> Work at ANL supported by U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under Contract No W-31-109-ENG-38.
The Ex­per­i­men­tal Physics and In­dus­trial Con­trol Sys­tem (EPICS) pro­vides con­trol and data ac­qui­si­tion for the ex­per­i­men­tal physics com­mu­nity. Be­cause the ca­pa­bil­i­ties re­quired by the ex­per­i­men­tal physics com­mu­nity for con­trol were not avail­able through in­dus­try, we began the de­sign and im­ple­men­ta­tion of EPICS. It is a dis­trib­uted process con­trol sys­tem built on a soft­ware com­mu­ni­ca­tion bus. The func­tional sub­sys­tems, which pro­vide data ac­qui­si­tion, su­per­vi­sory con­trol, closed loop con­trol, archiv­ing, and alarm man­age­ment, greatly re­duce the need for pro­gram­ming. Se­quen­tial con­trol is pro­vided through a se­quen­tial con­trol lan­guage, al­low­ing the im­ple­menter to ex­press state di­a­grams eas­ily. Data analy­sis of the archived data is pro­vided through an in­ter­ac­tive tool. The tim­ing sys­tem pro­vides dis­trib­uted syn­chro­niza­tion for con­trol and time stamped data for data cor­re­la­tion across nodes in the net­work. The sys­tem is scal­able from a sin­gle test sta­tion with a low chan­nel count to a large dis­trib­uted net­work with thou­sands of chan­nels. The func­tions pro­vided to the physics ap­pli­ca­tions have proven help­ful to the ex­per­i­ments while greatly re­duc­ing the time to de­liver con­trols. 		 
DOI • reference for this paper ※ doi:10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS1991-S07IC03  
About • Received ※ 11 November 1991 — Accepted ※ 20 November 1991 — Issued ※ 04 December 1992  
Cite • reference for this paper using ※ BibTeX, ※ LaTeX, ※ Text/Word, ※ RIS, ※ EndNote (xml)  
 
S13MMI06 A Virtual Control Panel Configuration Tool for the X-Window System 468
 
  • J.O. Hill, L.R. Dalesio, D.M. Kerstiens
    LANL, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA
  
  Funding: Work supported and funded under the Department of Defense, US Army Strategic Defense Command, under the auspices of the Department of Energy.
Com­puter Graph­ics Work­sta­tions are be­com­ing in­creas­ingly pop­u­lar for use as vir­tual process con­trol and read back pan­els. The work­sta­tion’s CRT, key­board, and point­ing de­vice are used in con­cert to pro­duce a dis­play that is in essence a con­trol panel, even if ac­tual switches and gauges are not pre­sent. The code be­hind these dis­plays is most often spe­cific to one dis­play and not reusable for any other dis­play. Re­cently, pro­grams have been writ­ten al­low­ing many of these vir­tual con­trol panel dis­plays to be con­fig­ured with­out writ­ing ad­di­tional code. This ap­proach al­lows the ini­tial pro­gram­ming ef­fort to be reap­plied to many dif­fer­ent dis­play in­stances with min­i­mal ef­fort. These pro­grams often in­cor­po­rate many of the fea­tures of a graph­ics ed­i­tor, al­low­ing a pic­to­r­ial model of the process under con­trol to be in­cor­po­rated into the con­trol panel. We have just fin­ished writ­ing a sec­ond gen­er­a­tion soft­ware sys­tem of this type for use with the X-Win­dow sys­tem and the Ex­per­i­men­tal Physics and In­dus­trial Con­trol Sys­tem (EPICS). This paper de­scribes the pri­mary fea­tures of our soft­ware, the frame­work of our de­sign, and our ob­ser­va­tions after ini­tial in­stal­la­tion. 		 
DOI • reference for this paper ※ doi:10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS1991-S13MMI06  
About • Received ※ 11 November 1991 — Accepted ※ 20 November 1991 — Issued ※ 04 December 1992  
Cite • reference for this paper using ※ BibTeX, ※ LaTeX, ※ Text/Word, ※ RIS, ※ EndNote (xml)