Design of a Distributed Control System Based on CORBA and JAVA for a New RIB facility at LNL

SPES (Study for the Production of Exotic Species) is a LNL project that will produce by the end of this year the conceptual design of a specialized facility for Radioactive Ion Beam (RIB) originated by fission fragments produced by secondary neutrons; this facility will be characterized by moderate size, performance and cost and will allow to produce also intense neutron beams for activities both in fundamental and applied Nuclear Physics [1]. In the context of this design study and tightly related to medium size of this facility the architecture of a distributed control system using the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) [2] as middleware framework and JAVA [3] as main programming language was investigated for the core sub-systems (diagnostics, optics, RF-control) of the primary accelerator. The performance of CORBA for the high level control system was measured in different conditions and showed to be sufficient to cover the requirements for remote operations, because all feedback loops will be performed either in specialized hardware or by dedicated real-time embedded controllers. A minimal programming effort, a good level of modularity and long-term maintenance were the reasons to choose JAVA and its related application builders as the main programming language for the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and the middleware implementations of this project