THE INTEGRATED CONTROL SYSTEM FOR KSTAR

ABSTRACT The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) control system will be developed as a network-based distributed real-time control system composed of several sub-systems. The central control system includes discharge control, machine control, diagnostic control, timing, and interlocks. There are also local control systems for various sub-systems. We are planning to integrate the entire system with several networks including a reflective memory based real-time network, an optical timing network, a Gigabit Ethernet network for generic machine control, and a storage network. The Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) has been chosen as the middleware of KSTAR control system because the EPICS framework provides network-based real-time distributed control, operating system independent programming tools, operator interface (OPI) tools, archiving tools, and interface tools with other commercial and non-commercial software. However, while EPICS can provide for and solve a variety of problems, there still remain some unresolved issues for the integration of both hardware and software. From the hardware point of view, we have to consider supporting Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Extension for Instruments (PXI) and Compact PCI (cPCI) systems which are not popular in the EPICS community but are required by machine control and physics diagnostics in KSTAR. From the software point of view, we have to make an interface between EPICS and some vested legacy codes in the Nuclear Fusion community, i.e. Model Driven System Plus (MDSplus) from MIT and the Plasma Control System from General Atomic (GA). We will present the details of the integration issues and also will give a brief summary of the entire KSTAR control system from an integration point of view