Upgrade of general control system employed for Materials and Life Science Experimental Facility of J-PARC

Watanabe, Akihiko; Sakai, Kenji ; Oi, Motoki ; Meigo, Shinichiro   ; Takada, Hiroshi   

The General Control System (GCS) of the MLF of J-PARC has a problem that it costs very much in the maintenance because of its poor flexibility on OS, etc. For resolving the problem, we have re-examined framework and application softwares for the MLF-GCS, in considering functions that PLCs in many local control panels are controlled by the plural exclusive PCs, and operating data over 7000 are acquired, stored and distributed with suitable data format by shared servers. Furthermore, we have made a prototype of an upgraded GCS and evaluated its concrete performances with true data such as communication speed between the PLCs and PCs, control functions from operating windows, storage capability of data server, and long-term stability of the system. In conclusion, we decided to adopt following softwares for the upgraded GCS: EPICS as framework software, Takebishi OPC server as data input/output module, CSS as user interface window and PostgreSQL for the data storage server.