JRTF: A flexible software framework for real-time control in magnetic confinement nuclear fusion experiments

Abstract

The magnetic confinement nuclear fusion experiments require various real-time control applications like plasma control. ITER has designed the Plant system Fast Controller (PFC) for this job. ITER provided hardware and software standards and guidelines for building a PFC. In order to develop various real-time PFC applications efficiently, a flexible real-time software framework called J-TEXT real-time framework (JRTF) is developed by J-TEXT tokamak team. JRTF allowed developers to implement different functions as independent and reusable modules called Application Blocks (AB). The AB developers only need to focus on implementing the control tasks or the algorism, the time, scheduling, data sharing and eventing is handled by the JRTF pipelines. JRTF provide great flexibility developing ABs. Unit test against ABs can be developed easily and ABs can even be used in non-JRTF applications. JRTF also provides interfaces allowing JRTF applications to be configured and monitored at runtime. JRTF is compatible with ITER standard PFC hardware and ITER (Control, Data Access and Communication) CODAC Core software. It can be configured and monitored using (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) EPICS. Moreover the JRTF can be ported to different platforms and be integrated with supervisory control software other then EPICS. The paper presents the design and implementation of JRTF as well as brief test results.