Test suite for the archiver of a SCADA system

Topic: The group responsible for providing the main control system applications for all machines at CERN has to validate that every piece of the control systems used will be reliable and fully functional when the LHC and its experiments will do collisions of particles. CERN use PVSS from ETM/Siemens for the SCADA part of its control systems. This software has a component dedicated to archive into a centralised Oracle database values and commands of tenth of thousands hardware devices. This component, named RDB, has to be tested and validated in terms of functionality and performance. The need is high for that because archiving is a critical part of the control systems. In case of an incident on one of the machine, it will be unacceptable to not benefit of archiving the machine context at this moment just because of a bug in RDB. Bugs have to be spotted and reported to ETM. Results: The proposed solution is an extensible automatic tester able to evaluate currently around 160 cases of potential bugs. Since the beginning of this project last January, the RDB tester has been able to discover more than 10 problems in RDB. Most of them have since been fixed by ETM. Nowadays CERN is confident that the machine exploitation will not encounter any problem related to RDB. Still, RDB needs more effort and attention to ensure that future usage of PVSS will not hit other problems RDB may cause. The proposed solution has taken in account that CERN will need to extend the tests to newer cases.