DEPLOYING THE UNICOS INDUSTRIAL CONTROLS FRAMEWORK IN MULTIPLE PROJECTS AND ARCHITECTURES

The UNICOS industrial controls framework, initially designed for LHC cryogenics controls on top of the PVSS-II SCADA system, is being successfully deployed for several other projects based on different architectures. This includes a variety of front-end systems (multiple PLC and VME solutions), communication methods and device models. In addition to the reuse of components and tools allowing fast development for the hardware commissioning phase and ensuring coherence between front-end and supervision process variables, this choice guarantees common HMI standards and will thus facilitate their use by the operation team. These projects benefit of the already developed integration with LHC accelerator central facilities (alarms and data logging). INTRODUCTION The UNICOS project (for UNified Industrial Control System) provides an homogeneous control system for the cryoplants supplying liquid helium to the LHC accelerator, the cryogenic equipment in the machine tunnel, and the ATLAS & CMS cryogenic systems. This system is now in use since 2002 for the commissioning of these cryoplants. The technical design took advantage of accumulated expertise on previous cryogenic systems such as for LEP2, based on the Decentralised Control Systems of the process industry. For UNICOS, CERN required the providers to offer open interfaces between the different layers, instead of closed solutions forcing dependence on a single supplier. This resulted in a design based on SCADA and PLC industrial components. MAIN FEATURES OF THE UNICOS FRAMEWORK The advantages of layer independence appeared from the early phase of the project, allowing to easily change the SCADA layer in order to fit with recent CERN standardization on PVSS-II. This choice permitted to share common components with the LHC Experiment Joint Controls project (JCOP). It then appeared that the project core of the cryogenics applications (otherwise called framework) could be applied to other domains, the first one being the detector gas control systems[2]. Briefly stated, the UNICOS framework is targeted to allow Supervision development with minimal SCADA expertise, and evolutive maintenance of supervision layer by operators/users. It applies well to strongly device-oriented distributed system designs, where process logic and sequences are in the front-end layer. The operator layer functionality consist mostly of device monitoring in a hierarchy of views, trending (on-line and archival) based on time-stamping at the source, alarms, events and device control. Conversely, this solution is not appropriate to build computation-intensive applications which can be found in other areas of accelerator controls. GENERIC SUPERVISION FEATURES The supervision part of the framework allows connexion to multiple front-ends. All user interface appears within a main window frame (able to manage 2 displays), consisting in: ‚ a fixed header (adaptable for each application domain) allowing access to common views such as system status, window tree, alarm list, event list,.. ‚ a central panel for the process views (synoptics and trends) ‚ a footer area which contains context-dependent buttons (typically, the set of possible actions on a selected device). 10th ICALEPCS Int. Conf. on Accelerator & Large Expt. Physics Control Systems. Geneva, 10 14 Oct 2005, WE3A.2-6O (2005)