Development and commissioning results of the KSTAR discharge control system

Abstract

The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) control system has been developed as a network-based distributed control system composed of several sub-systems. There are many local control systems for various sub-systems, and the central control system includes discharge control, machine control, and safety interlocks which aim for integrated control of the entire system. We have chosen the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) as the middleware of the KSTAR control system because EPICS provides a software framework to integrate heterogeneous systems. The discharge control system, which is implemented in a part of the supervisory control system, performs the discharge sequence execution. The plasma control system, which has been implemented with general atomics and modified for KSTAR, is involved in the discharge control. The plasma control system performs real-time plasma control algorithms and provides the results of the control algorithms to the magnet power supplies. We are using a reflective memory-based real-time network for communication between the plasma control system and the magnet power supplies, thus we developed a fully digital control for the magnet power supplies. We have implemented the discharge control system with state notation language (SNL) in EPICS and also developed interface software among the sub-systems. We will present the details of the development of the KSTAR discharge control system and commissioning results.