REAL-TIME MEASUREMENT AND CONTROL AT JET - STATUS 2007

The Joint European Tokamak (JET) is a large machine for experiments on fusion plasmas. Many of the experiments use real-time measurements and controls to establish and/or maintain specific plasma conditions. Each Instrument (Diagnostic or Heating/Fuelling/Magnet) is connected to a network. The number of systems has now grown to over thirty, and new systems are being planned for the future. Since some of the systems are used to control critical parameters of the JET plasma, we are improving the availability, reliability and maintainability of the facility. We must ensure that systems check their message structures against a central Data Dictionary, at build-time and run-time and secondly that the systems check their input data streams are alive before, during and after a JET pulse. Finally, we are developing high-level control configuration tools. From all of these, we identify some general principles which are applicable to the next generation machines.