Program Tracks

Program Outline

Status Reports
Project Management & System Engineering
Control System Evolution
Safety/High Reliability and Major Challenges
Protection Systems
Hardware Technology
Reconfigurable Hardware
Industrial Systems in Controls
Software Technology Evolution
Web Technology
Process Tuning and Feedback Systems
Operational Tools
Data and Information management
Fabric management.

1. Status Reports

Organizers: Jean-François Gournay, In Soo Ko, Mike Mouat, Peter Clout

The track on Status Reports gives an introduction to a broad array of new, experimental, physics facilities. These presentations will cover areas such as particle accelerators and detectors, fusion devices, telescopes, synchrotron light sources, and gravity wave detectors. Topics are intended to reflect, from a control system perspective, installations under construction, recently commissioned, or even those proposed but not yet approved. In addition to reports on individual facilities, a strong encouragement is given to survey talks describing challenges and state-of-the-art solutions.

2. Project Management and System Engineering

Organizers: Dekang Liu, Gianni Raffi, Karen White

The track covers all aspects of project management and system engineering for planning, development and maintenance of control systems, including:

Requirements definition and tracking
Resource solutions (e.g. in-house, contract, outsourcing, collaboration)
Project management tools
Software engineering processes (e.g., waterfall, iterative, agile)
Methodologies and tools
Configuration control processes and tools
Testing and quality assurance
Managing collaborative projects
Managing and motivating people
Cost, Benefit and Risk Analysis

3. Control System Evolution

Organizers: Matthew Bickley, Philip Duval, Sarbajit Pal

This track will deal with issues involved in upgrading, re-engineering, and maintaining existing control systems in an era of fast-paced technological advances. Possible topics for this track would include:

Descriptions of control systems or subsystems that have been substantially improved or modified. These may include software or hardware systems or both.
The problem of rolling upgrades and legacy control systems, where 'old' and 'new' must operate concurrently and communicate with each other during the upgrade process.
Minimizing the impact of a major upgrade on operations.
Designing control systems to accommodate evolution.
Managing increasing user's expectations on the modern control system.
Lessons learned from examples of successful upgrades as well as those that were less than successful.

4. Safety/High Reliability and Major Challenges

Organizers: Wayne Salter, Claude Saunders

When designing a control system that meets project requirements, there are inevitably a few select requirements that pose a significant, transformative (as opposed to evolutionary) challenge to the architects and developers. These requirements often involve what are called cross-cutting concerns. In other words, the requirement imposes design considerations throughout the system.

A common example is the requirement for overall high system availability, which involves both designing for high reliability as well as rapid diagnosis and repair. Other examples are requirements for adherence to a comprehensive cyber-security policy, remote access, automation, operation in high radiation environments, and high-rate synchronous data acquisition. In particular, safety requirements necessitate comprehensive and often dedicated design. This track is soliciting papers related to meeting any such requirement that poses a transformative (or major) challenge. We welcome both analysis of a significant requirement that has yet to be realized, as well as concrete designs and implementations.

5. Protection Systems

Organizers: Eric Björklund, Kuotung Hsu, Luigi Scibile

The operation of a complex experimental machine will frequently involve a number of potential hazards to personnel, the environment, and to the machine itself. These hazards can arise from several sources such as stored energy, cryogenics, radiation, and mechanical motion. While some protections are usually embedded within the overall control system, when it comes to the protection of people, the environment or the safe operation of the machine, dedicated systems are often required. These systems will frequently need to satisfy national and/or international safety regulations.

For the purposes of this track:

Personnel Protection Systems refer to all the systems and sub-systems involved with keeping people away from, or alerting them to the presence of hazardous conditions.
Environment Protection Systems refer to all the systems and sub-systems involved in preventing excess generation and release of harmful substances into the environment. The term "Environment" can apply both to the environment outside the experimental facility as well as to the local environment. For example, irradiating a piece of experimental equipment may not create an external environmental threat (due to barriers and shielding) but could present a severe maintenance problem locally.
Machine Protection Systems refer to all the systems and sub-systems involved in protecting the machine from damage, either as a result of equipment malfunction or operator error.

This track will focus mainly on "active protection systems" (as opposed to "passive protection systems" such as shielding, barriers, and administrative controls). The track will address these different types of protection systems, their purpose, how they have been developed, and how they are certified. The longer-term experience of using such systems will also be addressed to understand how this might influence the strategies for future applications.

The track will cover:

Protection systems hardware and software architectures.
Designing, procuring, integrating and operating protection systems on accelerators, telescopes, and large experimental systems.
Trade-offs between turn-key systems, hybrid development and fully home-made systems.
How protection systems are certified.
Lessons learned from experience.

6. Hardware Technology

Organizers: Larry Hoff, Yuji Otake

This track covers emerging hardware technologies providing new opportunities for control systems. It also covers custom hardware developments to meet specific control system requirements.

Examples include:

Timing systems
High speed data links, e.g. PCIe, Ethernet, USB, I2C
Signal processing and data acquisition systems
PLC systems
Processors within devices, e.g. on mezzanine modules, within FPGAs
Radiation hardened devices
Challenges with hardware/firmware/software integration and management

7. Reconfigurable Hardware

Organizers: Timo Korhonen, Hideya Nakanishi, Tom Shea

As the use of field configurable devices such as FPGAs continues to expand, applications have evolved from glue logic to complete systems-on-a-chip. Recent applications now make use of this technology's possibilities: rapid adaptation to changing requirements, true real-time capability, data processing at the low level, and a high degree of parallelism, just to mention a few.

This track covers technology specifically related to reconfigurable hardware and to dynamically configurable devices. Contributions that demonstrate the use of configurable hardware in control systems or that discuss the potential of this technology are solicited. Relevant topics include:

applications of FPGAs and DSPs to computing, signal processing, and real-time tasks
applications that benefit from parallel processing at a low level
innovative uses of reconfigurability; for example, to improve radiation tolerance
platform selection (custom and commercial); life-cycle and migration issues
integration of system-on-a-chip solutions into the control system infrastructure
experience with design and verification tools
collaboration and design sharing

8. Industrial Systems in Controls

Organizers: Richard Farnsworth, Kazuro Furukawa, Philippe Gayet

The way industrial control systems are integrated in large physics facilities is evolving. This track solicits papers describing interesting integration of commercial and industrial products or technologies into the existing control system and its effectiveness and influence in the delivery of this towards the total control system approaches. This includes the use of commercial off the shelf equipment, design and delivery to specification and other industry collaborative approaches.

In addition, papers dealing with the techniques or methods employed to deal with the challenges of managing the design, procurement or development, deployment and installation of industrial control systems or the specification of control subsystems as delivered by industry are welcomed.

9. Software Technology Evolution

Organizers: Vito Baggiolini, Noriichi Kanaya, Dennis Nicklaus

The scope of this session includes algorithms, implementations, applications, and performance aspects related to applying advanced software technology for accelerators and large experimental control systems.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

Software design methods and software development processes
Design patterns and software architectures
Frameworks, reusable components or libraries
New languages, programming environments and tools
Concurrent, parallel or distributed systems
Methods and tools for quality assurance and testing
Interoperability between diverse control systems and solutions for bridging between them

We encourage both contributions that describe tools or technologies you have developed and contributions that present your experience in novel applications of modern tools/libraries/frameworks.

All contributions should address the following points:

The motivation of the research or the problem to be solved
The approach used to solving the problem with software
The novel contribution made to the field of control systems
The concrete results obtained and the improvements achieved
The lessons learned and insight gained

10. Web Technology

Organizers: Matthias Clausen, Richard Kouzes, Ge Lei, Tom Pelaia

This track is a forum for presenting and discussing web technologies applied to control systems. Examples of web technologies that may be employed in support of control systems are: HTML/XHTML/XML, XSLT, DOM, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, HTTP, RTP, application servers. Ideally we will also discuss in this track whether new technologies and specifications like: REST (REpresentational State Transfer) Google Web Toolkit, OSGi-based Web Server or WHATWG may help us to implement web based control applications in the future.

Topics include (web based):

Display Managers
Data Management, Browsing, Analysis, Streaming and Presentation
Collaboration (e.g. Logbooks)
Remote Operation

11. Process Tuning and Feedback Systems

Organizers: Marco Lonza, Hamid Shoaee, Masaru Takao

Effective commissioning and operation of modern experimental physics facilities rely on a variety of applications to set up, tune and optimize complex processes. Feedback and feed forward systems, in particular, can be essential for a stable operation and even become indispensable to perform the experiments. The successful implementation of such applications and systems requires the integration of high-level applications, online models, archiving, data visualization and real-time processing into a coherent and functional software environment.

Possible topics for this track include:

Machine and experiment automation, tuning and optimization
Feedback systems
Modeling techniques

12. Operational Tools

Organizers: Don Dohan, Hiroyuki Sako

Operational tools may be categorized into two groups; control system tools and generic tools.

Control system tools include various kinds of device control and database tools in the control room, including device control tools, automated machine turn-on and optimization, device monitors and viewers, alarm and fault-tracking systems, operation logs, data-archiving and retrieval, component history and infrastructure maintenance workflow tools.

Generic tools include applications for parameter tuning and correction, machine modeling, database access and data analysis. They include the development of software frameworks and languages for these tools as used in machine commissioning and operation.

13. Data and Information Management

Organizers: Andy Gotz, John Maclean, Akihiro Yamashita

Data plays a crucial role in control systems. Data in a control system can be the settings and readings from hardware, but also all information which is used to configure the control system and add value to raw data e.g. in interpreting results in a quantitative and qualitative manner. Data and information can be live, stored in databases or archived for long term storage.

This track is dedicated to all aspects of data and information management in control systems. This includes databases but also other technologies e.g. how to organise, query, display, store, share, make it publicly available, and duplicate data. Should data be stored in XML, binary or other formats. Often control systems duplicate information needed to configure the control system. How to avoid duplication of work in control systems is therefore a very important topic. Should a meta-database i.e. a database to generate other databases, be used ? Data security for publicly accessible data needs to be addressed. Should grid technologies be used ? How to manage a distributed data system ? How to manage huge databases efficiently ? What real time databases are being used in control systems today ? How to combine data generated by the source e.g. accelerator, data generated by experiments ? Of particular interest are new applications of data and information management which address the above and related questions.

This track is dedicated to all aspects of data and information management in control systems. This includes databases but also other technologies e.g.

How to organise, query, display, store, share, make it publicly available, and duplicate data.
Should data be stored in XML, binary or other formats ?
Often control systems duplicate information needed to configure the control system. How to avoid duplication of work in control systems is therefore a very important topic.
Should a meta-database i.e. a database to generate other databases, be used ?
Data security for publicly accessible data needs to be addressed. Should grid technologies be used ?
How to manage a distributed data system ?
How to manage huge databases efficiently ?
What real time databases are being used in control systems today ?
How to combine data generated by the source e.g. accelerator, data generated by experiments ?

Of particular interest are new applications of data and information management which address the above and related questions.

14. Fabric Management

Organizers: Norihiko Kamikubota, Niko Neufeld

Fabrics Management covers all aspects of the management of computer and network hardware and their associated infrastructure as well as access to the fabric:

Fabrics virtualization
Fabrics management and administration
Network and Fabrics monitoring
Integration of Fabrics Management in large Control Systems using SCADA
Remote access to control systems and experimental facilities
Automation of software installation and upgrades