An Introduction to Plant Monitoring through the EPICS Control System
John A. Carwardine
Argonne National Laboratory
The Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) environment
provides the framework for monitoring of any equipment connected to it. Various
tools offer engineers and scientists the opportunity to easily create
high-level monitoring applications without having to rely on expert programmers
to develop custom programs. This paper is aimed at the first-time or casual
user, providing the essential information for using several of the tools.
Examples are taken from applications in daily use at APS. The reader is
introduced to the concept of Process Variables which provide the link from
control system tools to the actual hardware. The EPICS 'alarm handler' tool
alerts the operator to events such as a power supply trip or a bad vacuum
reading. This tool is described and the user is guided through the steps needed
to configure it for a particular application. The plant monitoring capabilities
provided through EPICS are exploited by several programs in the Self-Describing
Data Sets (SDDS) toolkit. The SDDS concept is described using a simple text
file as an example. The reader is then introduced to the program 'sddsmonitor'
for collecting data from several Process Variables at once, and to 'sddsplot'
for graphically displaying the data collected.