THE UPGRADE OF THE ANKA CONTROL SYSTEM TO ACS (ADVANCED CONTROL SYSTEM)

The entire CORBA communication layer at the syn-chrotron light source ANKA was efficiently upgraded to the next generation device servers, based on Advanced Control System (ACS). The old system, which was running since 2000, required an upgrade to a new version of com-mercial CORBA libraries. Instead of purchasing a costly li-cense, a decision was made to upgrade to open source TAO CORBA and ACS. The design of ACS is the next step in the evolution of the idea, which lays behind the old ANKA CS, a vision of a control system with distributed CORBA ob-jects for remotely controllable physical devices. The ACS, developed in cooperation with ESO, extended the old de-vice servers with improved management and debugging ca-pabilities and greatly improved the long time stability of servers on Windows NT machines. Adjustment to the new server interface was smooth and without major changes at the fieldbus and client side of the CS. This was possible due to modular object-oriented architecture at all control sys-tem layers and good design of interfaces for devices. The code of complex Java clients stayed practically the same, we only had to change the communication plug of Abeans, our core Java libraries. This has significantly reduced the upgrade time because all end-user Java applications re-mained visually and functionally unchanged. This is also of great value to the operators because no additional train-ing was required. Interfaces to LonWorks device drivers, which are based on functionality of devices, also remained unchanged. In a system with a large number of various de-vices we were able to keep the whole LonWorks fieldbus intact, we even used the same configuration database with the same set of installed drivers. The smoothness of the upgrade confirms that our developments were focused into the right direction. Now even those users are 100 % satis-fied with the control system, who always had something to complain about