Actuator management development on ASDEX-Upgrade

Abstract

In future tokamak devices, the control system will have to handle several control goals simultaneously with a limited number of actuators in long and high performance discharges. One of the critical roles of the future control systems will be the management of actuators, which would assign the most convenient available actuators primarily to the control goals of the highest importance at the time. Such a system would consist of a discharge program defining the experiment, a discharge supervisor making automatic high level decisions in real time and a component handling the actuators at a lower level: The virtual actuator, which is a software object responsible for distributing the controller commands to a set of selected actuators. This paper describes the implementation of a virtual actuator for all 8 gyrotrons of ASDEX-Upgrade. We also describe the intended use of the virtual actuator for three experiments: β control using ECRH, a disruption avoidance strategy, and electron temperature profile control. The paper also gives an overview of future actuator management developments at ASDEX-Upgrade: extension to all heating sources, inclusion of mirrors for ECRH, and intelligent real time distribution of the actuators between the control goals.