Commissioning and Operation Applications of ELETTRA

M. Plesko, Institute Jozef Stefan, Ljubljana, Slovenia
C.J. Bocchetta, F. Iazzourene, E. Karantzoulis, R. Nagaoka and L. Tosi,
Sincrotrone Trieste, Trieste, Italy


ELETTRA is a third generation light source at an electron beam energy of 1.5 to 2 GeV. For commissioning and operation a multitude of high level software (HLS) has been prepared and successfully used which is presented in this paper. This is the first time that the HLS was developed well in advance and ready for the operating personnel. The applications cover the whole range of needs, have a consistent graphical user interface (GUI) and give a fast response to user actions. All commissioning tools are now used as operational tools, too, therefore there was no loss in manpower and resources.

The state of the art applications, which have been designed systematically, were the key to the rapid commissioning and great success of ELETTRA. The applications use a unique data structure based on machine physics and a set of routines which transparently access the control system. The novel environment greatly simplifies the development of applications, because the programmers can concentrate on the GUI, which gives immediate tactile information on the status of the machine. This approach significantly reduced development time and simplifies future maintenance. It is easy to implement new programs in very short time whenever the needs for additional actions arise.

The content of the data structure is not specific to ELETTRA, since it is generated dynamically at run-time from several text-only editable data files. Most of the applications can be easily transferred to other accelerators as long as their control system uses UNIX workstations., The use of standards (C, X11/Motif) and the transparency in the access to the actual control system implementation insure it.