SCADA Software for INDRA Monitoring

Market Survey

EPICS

EPICS is an "Experimental Physics Industrial Control System" and has been developed at LANL and ANL for the purpose of building distributed control systems to operate devices such as Particle Accelerators or large Experiments.

FactoryLink

FactoryLink is a "Real-Time Application Development Toolset" by USDATA.

LabView / BrideView

LabView is a "graphical programming environment for data acquisition and instrument control applications" by National Instruments, while BrideView is characterized by National Instruments as "Graphical Programming for Industrial Automation".

RTworks

RTworks is a set of "Advanced Tools For Complex, Real-Time Applications" by Talarian. For a summary of the architecture consult the Command and Control system overview.

Functionality

BridgeView combines the functionality of LabView with an event driven I/O concept and an integrated alarm handling and data logging. For a summary see the product description. The data handling in terms of tags as well as the alarm handling is similar to FactoryLink. BridgeView uses a special database called Citadel for data logging. This database has not the standard relational database structure but is optimized to store and quickly retrieve the time dependence of parameters in the most compact fashion. However, an SQL interface is provided and other applications can access it like a RdB.
BridgeView is tightly integrated with WindowsNT (or Windows95) and provides Microsoft interfaces like OLE, ODBC and OPC for data exchange with other applications. Consequently there is no UNIX version of BridgeView, in contrast to EPICS, FactoryLink and RTworks, which either run exclusively under UNIX or have at least UNIX versions.

EPICS was initially developed for accelerator control and has recently been used for experiment control too. It is used for example at CEBAF (accelerator control), DESY (cyro and water controls) and SLAC (BaBar).
It is being evaluated for usage in LHC exeriments by the CERN Control Systems Group. The full evaluation report, issued 8-Sep-1997, contains a good overview of the system and is available from CERN. The report was recently summarised in the ATLAS DCS meeting on 9.9.97 by D. Myers (CERN ECPCO):

"The distributed client-server architecture of EPICS fits well for LHC experiments, sub-detectors could map well onto (groups of) IOCs. The availability of the source code gives great flexibility (but this might become also a burden!). A major drawback is, that the Operator Interface packages are not integrated with each other and miss quite some functionality. There is also no connection to a performant commercial data base system and security, diagnostic and debugg facilities are missing. As a result a sizable support team for both upgrades and maintainance would be needed. This is the case at all other major sites where EPICS is in use."

FactoryLink and RTworks are classical process control systems and their functionality is well matched with the INDRA requirements. Both are, like EPICS, huge and quite complex software systems with a substantial learning curve. Some local or at least nearby expertise will certainly be very helpful and it is thus of some importance where the packages are currently used:

• FactoryLink has been used in several CERN HEP experiments (see NA48 Control System and West Area Neutrino Facility Control System) and for the GSI therapy project.

• RTworks has lately been used in several NASA projects, e.g. the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) (see e.g. System Monitoring Summary) and Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (EUVE).

Summary

FactoryLink is the only solution with solid expertise at GSI. But since BridgeView is a superset of LabView, which is used in several places at GSI (and many other labs), one has at least partial local expertise in this case.

This leads to the following, certainly quite simplifying, pros-and-cons map:

Conclusion

Cost:

The full development license for BridgeView is about 10kDM, while a FactoryLink license is about 25k$. It will be possible to borrow a FactoryLink license for the duration of the INDRA experiment at GSI, which would eliminate all license costs for 1998. However, a possible later usage of a FactoryLink based solution for the next campaign at GANIL requires purchase of licenses.

Platform:

BrideView runs on exclusively WindowsNT or Windows95, with all pros and cons of a Windows solution. FactoryLink is available for Windows, OS/2 and the UNIX flavors HPUX, SUN, AIX and DEC Unix.

Other Experiments:

Two projects at GSI, the Pestov Counter developed for NA49 and ALICE and the HADES experiment, are currently in the process of choosing a SCADA system. The time line for the decision is in both cases January 1998. Both projects consider very seriously a BrideView solution, mainly because LabView is already the system of choice for test systems, the license costs are lower, and last but not least, because two LHC experiments (ATLAS and ALICE) also indicated to use LabView/BrigdeView for subdetector prototyp and controls hardware tests.