DCS satellite: Enhanced plant system integration on ASDEX Upgrade

Abstract

For present and future fusion experiments, a higher level of integration for plant systems into the discharge control system (DCS) is becoming increasingly important. The integration is required to enable more sophisticated control schemes where a comprehensive plasma system state is needed. This is especially the case for large fusion devices such as ITER. On ASDEX Upgrade the integration of diagnostics, actuators and evaluation codes is done in a unified concept, the DCS satellite. Here the DCS framework and signal exchange is adopted on e.g. diagnostic nodes, where specialized DCS application processes (AP) interact with the sensor hardware, import it into the DCS system and let other APs process the data. This concept allows automated configuration and identification of the current plant system setup prior to the discharge execution. A comprehensive plasma state is generated during a pulse by the DCS framework which enables information exchange between the different DCS systems.So far this concept has successfully been demonstrated for National Instruments NI-RIO based FPGA diagnostics, video real time diagnostics (VRT) using CameraLink cameras, diagnostics using IPPs in-house standard SIO2 as well as diagnostic codes such as the equilibrium reconstruction code JANET++.