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.