THE BABYLONIZATION OF CONTROL SYSTEMS PART II-THE RISE OF FALLEN TOWER

The standardization in PC and network technology has produced a distinct (for want of a better term) "babylonization", where islands of control exist in perfect ignorance of each other even though they might belong to the very same facility. This is due in part to commercial equipment, which often comes with its own control software, commercial SCADA systems and to the many excellent but different solutions for control systems, which have been developed in the accelerator control community. A control systems integrator frequently has to make decisions with long-term and far-reaching consequences. Often a pragmatic approach is to allow resourceful engineers to use the best available tools to solve controls problems and then to integrate their solutions into the control system. It usually turns out that integration, if not done systematically, amounts for the largest part of the work. There are usually many ways to do this, for instance defining a software bus, using gateways, or simply allowing apples and oranges to peacefully coexist. In this paper, we will examine most of the available tools in our community for the integration of control systems, detailing the merits of each approach as well as some popular controls systems and components. We will provide a table comparing the most important features of open source accelerator/telescope and commercial SCADA systems. We will demonstrate that it is possible to mix them in order to benefit from the best part of each. DDD