CICERO: Control Information System Concepts Based
on Encapsulated Real-time Objects

A study on Generic Control Systems for Large
Scale LHC Experiments

Jean-Marie LeGoff
CERN

Modern High Energy Physics experiments and accelerators require sophisticated control systems to ensure their safe operation and to optimize their performance. Due to their complexity and to the large number of sensors needed for these purposes, they turn out to be difficult and costly to maintain with the present technology. The situation will seriously worsen with the LHC era. Various R&D departments of industrial companies are directly concerned with similar difficulties in power plants and complex automated systems. We have combined our efforts to study the various aspects of this problem. The main building blocks of a generic control information system were outlined and constructed. A middle ware called Cortex providing the integrating capabilities and the extended communication support for the integration of heterogeneous legacy control products has been developed. To support the long life-cycle of these large projects, the middle ware relies on CORBA, the powerful emerging standard proposed by all the major computer manufacturers. In addition, CICERO provides a series of common components, to be used as templates for the construction of specific CORBA compliant control services such as Archiver/Retriever, Finite State machines and GUI. A prototype has been built as a first step towards our main goal to provide technical solutions which could later be the major components of a basic turnkey system for medium to large scale HEP experiments and accelerators. The key concepts and the tools used in this project will be presented as well as a status report on the current siutation and future plans.