[en] A large number of control systems at CERN are built with the commercial SCADA tool WinCC OA (formerly PVSS). They cover projects in the experiments, accelerators and infrastructure. An important component is the Oracle archiver used for long term storage of process data (events) and alarms. The archived data provide feedback to the operators and experts about how the system was behaving at particular moment in the past. In addition a subset of these data is used for offline physics analysis (conditions data). Large volumes of data are produced by the different facilities at CERN (several Tera-bytes per year). The consistency of the archived data has to be ensured from writing to reading as well as throughout updates of the control systems. The complexity of the archiving subsystem comes from the multiplicity of data types, required performance and other factors such as operating system, environment variables or versions of the different software components. Therefore an automatic tester has been implemented to systematically execute test scenarios under different conditions. The tests are based on scripts which are automatically generated from templates, therefore they can cover a wide range of software contexts. The tester has been fully written in the same software environment as the targeted SCADA system. The current implementation is able to handle over 300 test cases, both for events and alarms. It has enabled to report issues to the provider of WinCC OA. The template mechanism allows sufficient flexibility to adapt the suite of tests to future needs. The developed tools are generic enough to be used to test other parts of the control systems. (authors)

[en] The JCOP Framework is a tool-kit used widely at CERN for the development of industrial control systems in several domains (i.e. experiments, accelerators and technical infrastructure). The software development started 10 years ago and there is now a large base of production systems running it. For the success of the project, it was essential to formalize and automate the quality assurance process. This paper will present the overall testing strategy and will describe in detail mechanisms used for GUI (Graphical User Interface) testing. The choice of a commercial tool (Squish) and the architectural features making it appropriate for our multi-platform environment will be described. Practical difficulties encountered when using the tool in the CERN context are discussed as well as how these were addressed. In the light of initial experience, the test code itself has been recently reworked in object-oriented style to facilitate future maintenance and extension. The current reporting process is described, as well as future plans for easy result-to-specification linking. The paper concludes with a description of our initial steps towards incorporation of full-blown Continuous Integration (CI) support. (authors)

[en] For decades the user interfaces of industrial control systems have been primarily based on native clients. However, the current IT trend is to have everything on the web. This can indeed bring some advantages such as easy deployment of applications, extending HMIs with turnkey web technologies, and apply to supervision interfaces the interaction model used on the web. However, this also brings its share of challenges: security management, ability to spread the load and scale out to many web clients, etc... In this paper, the architecture of the system that was devised at CERN to decouple the production WINCC-OA based supervision systems from the web frontend and the associated security implications are presented together with the transition strategy from legacy panels to full web pages using a stepwise replacement of widgets (e.g. visualization widgets) by their JavaScript counterpart. This evolution results in the on-going deployment of web-based supervision interfaces proposed to the operators as an alternative for comparison purposes. (author)

[en] The development and maintenance of the control systems of the four LHC experiments will require a non-negligible amount of resources and effort. The Joint COntrols Project (JCOP)[1] has been set-up as a collaboration between CERN and the four LHC experiments to find common solutions for the LHC experiments' control systems. Although the JCOP general principle is to promote the use of industrial solutions wherever possible, custom solutions are still required when non-standard devices or very large numbers of devices have to be controlled. Furthermore, to ease the development and integration of both standard and non-standard device into the control system a number of software Frameworks are under development. The authors will describe the various solutions being proposed by JCOP including the Supervisory and Front-End frameworks as well as the various industrial and custom components. In addition, they will also describe where these fit into the foreseen JCOP controls architecture. The authors will then highlight in more detail the Front-End Framework

[en] The power supply system for the magnets of the CERN PS (Proton Synchrotron) has been recently upgraded to a new system called POPS (Power for PS). The old mechanical machine has been replaced by a system based on capacitors. The equipment as well as the low level controls have been provided by an external company (CONVERTEAM). The supervision application has been developed at CERN reusing the technologies and tools used for the LHC Accelerator and Experiments (UNICOS and JCOP frameworks, SIMATIC WinCC Open Architecture SCADA tool). The POPS control system architecture is a 3 layer control system. The first layer is the field layer with remote input/output module connected to the control layer. This layer is composed of WAGO modules interfaced with the control layer via the PROFIBUS field-bus. The second layer is the control layer with CONVERTEAM hardware and software based on VME cards, holding the closed control loops and the voltage and capacitors control. The CONVERTEAM control system is distributed over four CPUs and remote IO modules. Each CPU is monitoring the link with the Supervision layer; the interruption of the communication stops the powering of the system. The third layer is the supervision layer. In this layer, process views are provided for the monitoring and the control/command interface of the control system. Other typical functions (e.g. archiving, trending, alarm handling) are also provided by this layer. The paper describes the full architecture of the control application, and the challenges faced for the integration with an out-sourced system. The benefits of reusing the CERN industrial control frameworks and the required adaptations will be discussed. Finally, the initial operational experience will be presented

[en] Almost 200 controls applications, in domains like LHC magnet protection, cryogenics and vacuum systems, cooling-and-ventilation or electrical network supervision, have been developed and are currently maintained by the CERN Industrial Controls Group in close collaboration with several equipment groups. The supervision layer of these systems is based on the same technologies as 400 other systems running in the LHC Experiments (e.g. WinCC Open Architecture, Oracle). During the last two-year LHC Long Shutdown 1, the 200 systems have been successfully migrated from a file-based archiver to a centralized infrastructure based on Oracle databases. This migration has homogenized the archiving chain for all CERN systems, and at the same time has presented a number of additional challenges. The paper presents the design, the necessary optimizations and the migration process that allowed us to meet unprecedented data-archiving rates (unachievable for the previously used system), and liaise with the existing long-term storage system (LHC LoggingDB) to assure data-continuity. (author)

[en] The SCADA package WinCC Open Architecture (WinCC OA) and the control frameworks (JCOP, UNICOS) were successfully used to implement many critical control systems at CERN. In the recent years, the Industrial Controls and Electronics (ICE) group of the Engineering Department (EN) at CERN, supported other groups to re-implement the supervision of technical infrastructure, like Electrical distribution (EL), and Cooling and Ventilation (CV), using these tools. However, the fact that these applications are highly independent from the operation point of view, as well as their increasing number, renders operation uncomfortable since shifters are forced to continuously switch between them. In order improve the integration, EN-ICE is developing the Technical Infrastructure Portal (TIP) to provide centralized access to all WinCC OA applications, and extending their functionality including links to external databases and to a powerful localization system based on GIS. In addition the tool offers an environment for operators to develop views that aggregate data from different sources, such as cooling and electricity. This paper also describes the challenges faced during the implementation of TIP due to the large degree of heterogeneity across applications, although they are made out of common building blocks.

[en] The automation infrastructure needed to reliably run CERN's accelerator complex and its experiments produces large and diverse amounts of data, besides physics data. Over 600 industrial control systems with about 45 million parameters store more than 100 terabytes of data per year. At the same time a large technical expertise in this domain is collected and formalized. The study is based on a set of use cases classified into three data analytics domains applicable to CERN's control systems: online monitoring, fault diagnosis and engineering support. A known root cause analysis concerning gas system alarms flooding was reproduced with Siemens' Smart Data technologies and its results were compared with a previous analysis. The new solution has been put in place as a tool supporting operators during breakdowns in a live production system. The effectiveness of this deployment suggests that these technologies can be applied to more cases. The intended goals would be to increase CERN's systems reliability and reduce analysis efforts from weeks to hours. It also ensures a more consistent approach for these analyses by harvesting a central expert knowledge base available at all times. (author)

[en] The detector control system for the NA62 experiment at CERN is going to be built based on control technologies recommended by the CERN Engineering group. In particular two approaches to building controls application need to play in harmony: the use of the high-level application framework called UNICOS, and a bottom-up approach of development based on the components of the JCOP Framework. The aim of combining the features provided by the two frameworks is to avoid duplication of functionality and minimize the maintenance and development effort for future controls applications. In the paper the result of the integration efforts obtained so far are presented; namely the control applications developed for beam-testing of NA62 detector prototypes. Even though the delivered applications are simple, significant conceptual and development work was required to bring about the smooth inter-play between the two frameworks, while assuring the possibility of unleashing their full power. A discussion of current open issues is presented, including the viability of the approach for larger-scale applications of high complexity, such as the complete detector control system for the NA62 detector. (authors)