OPC UA to DOOCS Bridge: A Tool for Automated Integration of Industrial Devices Into the Accelerator Control Systems at FLASH and European XFEL

Integrating off-the-shelf industrial devices into an accelerator control system often requires resource-consuming and error-prone software development to implement device-specific communication protocols. With recent progress in standards for industrial controls, more and more devices leverage the OPC UA machine-to-machine communication protocol to publish their functionality via an embedded information model. Here we present a generic DOOCS server, which uses a devices published OPC UA information model for automatic integration into the accelerator control systems of the FLASH and European XFEL free-electron laser facilities. The software makes all the devices variables and methods immediately accessible as DOOCS properties, reducing software development time and errors. We demonstrate that the servers and protocols latency allows DOOCS-based burst-to-burst feedback in the 10Hz operation modes of FLASH and European XFEL and is capable of handling more than 10⁴ data update events per second, without degrading performance. We also report on the successful integration of a commercial laser amplifier, as well as our own PLC-based laser protection system into DOOCS