A New Approach to Control System for Medium Scale Accelerators


Masakatsu Mutoh, Yoshinobu Shibasaki
Laboratory of Nuclear Science Tohoku University
Isamu Abe
National Laboratory for High Energy Physics (KEK)


A control system available for medium scale accelerators (e.g., electron linac, pulse beam stretcher and storage ring) has been designed. In order to reduce the construction and development cost, the system is composed of personal computers and Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC). The personal computers are used for a database server as a control manager and for operation consoles. The PLC functions as a device controller for controlling and monitoring the power supply system for magnets, the RF system, the vacuum system, etc. The personal computers and the PLCs are connected with a high speed network. The video signals from beam monitors are digitized and transmitted to the operation consoles via the same network. In the control software, object oriented technologies are adopted. An object oriented database which functions as the control manager is under development. The personal computers are running under Microsoft Windows NT. The graphic user interface is ParcPlace Visual Works.