[en] The 15th International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems ICALEPCS 2015, hosted by the Australian Synchrotron, brought together control systems specialists from the world’s large experimental physics facilities in Melbourne, Australia. The technical program included the latest on: Project status reports; systems engineering and project management; integrating complex or diverse systems; personnel safety and machine protection; hardware technology; timing and sync; software technology evolution; experiment control; process tuning and feedback systems; user interfaces and tools; data management, analytics, and visualisation; control systems infrastructure; mobile opportunities and challenges. This handbook includes 292 full scientific papers.

[en] The Canadian Light Source (CLS) uses the EPICS Distributed Control System (DCS) for control and feedback of a linear accelerator, booster ring, electron storage ring, and numerous x-ray beamlines. The number of host computers running EPICS IOC applications has grown to over 200, and the number of IOC applications exceeds 700. The first part of this paper will present the challenges and current efforts to monitor and report the status of the control system itself by monitoring the EPICS network traffic. This approach does not require any configuration or application modification to report the currently active applications, and then provide notification of any changes. The second part will cover the plans to use the information collected dynamically to improve upon the information gathered by process variable crawlers for an IRMIS database, with the goal to eventually replace the process variable crawlers. (author)

[en] This past year the Controls group within the Collider Accelerator Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory replaced the Network Attached Storage (NAS) system that is used to store software and data critical to the operation of the accelerators. The NAS also serves as the initial repository for all logged data. This purchase was used as an opportunity to categorize the data we store, and review and evaluate our storage strategies. This was done in the context of an existing policy that places no explicit limits on the amount of data that users can log, no limits on the amount of time that the data is retained at its original resolution, and that requires all logged data be available in real-time. This paper will describe how the data was categorized, and the various storage strategies used for each category. (author)

[en] The European Spallation Source (ESS) in Lund, Sweden has just entered into neutron beam line construction starting detailed design in 2015. As a collaboration of 17 European countries the majority of hardware devices will be provided in-kind. This presents numerous technical and organizational challenges for the construction and the integration of the neutron instrumentation into the facility wide infrastructure; notably the EPICS control network and the facilities absolute timing system. In this contribution we present a strategy for the modularity of the instruments hardware with well-defined standardized functionality and a minimized number of control & data interfaces. Key point of the strategy is the time stamping of all readings from the instruments control electronics extending the event mode data acquisition from detected neutron events to all metadata. This gives the control software the flexibility necessary to adapt the functionality of the instruments to the demands of each single experimental run. We give examples for the advantages of that approach in classical motion control as well as in complex robotics systems and discuss matching hardware requirements necessary. (author)

[en] IT Department of Synchrotron SOLEIL is structured along of a team of software developers responsible for the development and maintenance of all software from hardware controls up to supervision applications. With a very heterogonous development environment such as, several software languages, strongly coupled components and an increasing number of releases of the entire software stacks, it has become mandatory to standardize the entire development process through a “Continuous Delivery approach”; making it easy to release and deploy on time at any time. We achieved our objectives by building up a Continuous Delivery solution around two aspects, Deployment Pipeline and DevOps. A deployment pipeline is achievable by extensively automating all stages of the delivery process (the continuous integration of software, the binaries build and the integration tests). Another key point of Continuous Delivery is also a close collaboration between software developers and system administrators, often known as the DevOps movement. This paper details the feedbacks on how we have adopted this Continuous Delivery approach, modifying our daily development team life and give an overview of the future steps. (author)

[en] During the first Large Hadron Collider (LHC) shutdown period, software for the LHC Beam-based Feedback Controller (BFC) and accompanying Service Unit (BFSU) was migrated to new 64-bit multi-core hardware and to a new version of CERN's FESA realtime framework. This coincided with the transfer of responsibility to a new software team, charged with readying the systems for beam in 2015 as well as maintaining and improving the code-base in the future. In 90'000+ existing lines of code, a new testing framework was developed which would not only serve to define the system's functional specification, but also provide acceptance tests for future releases. This paper presents how the BFC and BFSU systems were decoupled from each other as well as from the LHC plant's measurement and actuator systems, thus allowing simulation-data driven instances to be deployed in a test environment. It also describes the resulting Java-based Domain-Specific Language (DSL) which allows the formation of repeatable acceptance tests. (author)

[en] Forschungszentrum Jülich has been operating the neutron instrument DNS at the neutron source FRM II for about 10 years. DNS is a time of flight neutron spectrometer with polarization analysis that experienced a major upgrade in 2014 and 2015. During the upgrade DNS was equipped with new electronics and a new control and data acquisition system, including a transition from the existing TACO system to its successor TANGO. On the client side the NICOS software developed at FRM II is used for the implementation of measurement operations and user interface. The design of the new control and data acquisition system is presented and the lessons learned by the introduction of TANGO are reported. (author)

[en] MAX IV Laboratory, a synchrotron facility in Lund, has selected TANGO as the control system framework for the entire facility. On the beamlines that are being built the Python-based SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system Sardana will be used for experimental control. SPECIES, one out of eight new soft X-ray beamlines, is used as a test bench for evaluating the chosen standards. Sardana is used to control the energy setting of the PGM (plane grating monochromator) as well as to provide macros and other utilities for the user. Generic Taurus GUIs and a SVG-synoptic give the user a way to interact with the control system and display relevant information. The standardized graphical interfaces give a familiar look and feel across the entire facility. All motorized axes are controlled with the IcePAP motion controller. For the axes of the PGM, the IcePAP driver operates in hardware closed loop. Special care is taken in order to avoid slow and inaccurate movements of the PGM energy due to the non-linear relationship between the motors and the angular encoders. (author)

[en] The Taiwan Photon Source (TPS) is a state-of-the-art synchrotron radiation facility featuring ultra-high photon brightness. Its Booster has 6 FODO cells which include 7 BD dipoles with 1.6 m long and 2 BH dipoles with 0.8 m long in each cell. After magnetization of stainless steel vacuum chamber of the booster were identified and then dismantled, annealed, and re-installed, the electron beam energy of the TPS booster ring has ramped to 3 GeV in a week. The booster tune correction during ramping is one of the main reasons why the booster commissioning progress so fast. This report will be summarized the booster tune monitor system. (author)

[en] Stable and reproducible generation of a photon beam at Free Electron Lasers (FELs) necessitates a low energy spread of the electron beam. A low level radio frequency (LLRF) control system stabilizes the RF field inside accelerating modules. An electron beam passing through the cavity induces a voltage proportional to the charge and the cavity shunt impedance. The feedback loop tries to compensate for the perturbation after the accelerating gradient drops. The delay and high gain result in an overshoot or oscillations during transients. A feed forward signal can be applied to act on the plant simultaneously with the RF feedback. It can be generated off-line based on system characteristics and beam parameters or on-line using information obtained from the beam diagnostic systems. In the latter scheme fluctuations of the beam current are accounted for in real-time using an open-loop (feedforward) controller. The bunch charge detection scheme and its implementation is described. This paper describes results of the tests performed on the ELBE (Electron Linac for beams with high Brilliance and low Emittance) radiation source at the HZDR (Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf) facility using a MTCA.4-based LLRF control system. (author)