Status of the new WEST plasma control system

Abstract

The WEST (W – for Tungsten – Environment in Steady state Tokamak) project is aiming at minimizing technology and operational risks of a full tungsten actively cooled divertor on ITER. It was started in 2013 and consists in transforming the Tore Supra tokamak into an X point divertor device, while taking advantage of its long discharge capability. To operate the next coming operations of WEST, new controllers are required. These developments are an opportunity to develop a new Plasma Control System (PCS) architecture featuring build-in real time handling of both plasma and plants events, thus addressing key ITER needs.The Tore Supra PCS will be refurbished including a new Pulse Schedule Editor (PSE). The main idea is to use a time segmented approach to describe the pulse schedule with a full integration of event handling both on PCS and PSE.Further to detailed requirement specifications and architecture design, two software tools were selected to define and execute a whole plasma discharge defined as a set of time segments. The PCS real-time framework (RTF) is based on an upgraded version of the AUG framework, called DCS (Discharge Control System). The PSE is the Xedit application used on WEGA and under further development for W7-X facility.This paper reports on the status of the new WEST PCS developments. The on-going developments to adapt DCS to the Tore Supra Control infrastructure networks (new real-time network, chronology system and pulse supervision) will be reported. The required preparations for the use of Xedit will be presented, mainly the appropriate formal description of the WEST control system and the implementation of the mapping between the Xedit experiment configuration and DCS configuration files.