IEPLC Framework, Automated Communication in a Heterogeneous Control System Environment

In CERN accelerators control system several components are essential such as: Programmable Logic Controller (PLC), PCI Extensions for Instrumentation (PXI), and other micro-controller families. Together with their weaknesses and their strength points they typically present custom communication protocols and it is therefore difficult to federate them into the control system using a single communication strategy. Furthermore this dependency to the physical device interfaces and protocols makes most of the code not reusable and the replacement of old technology a difficult problem. The purpose of IEPLC ([1]) is to mitigate the communication issues given by this heterogeneity; it proposes a framework to define communication interfaces in a hardware independent manner. In addition it automatically generates all the resources needed on master side (typically represented by a FEC: Front-End Computer) and slave side (typically represented by the controller) to implement a common and generic Ethernet communication. The IEPLC framework is composed of a set of tools,\nscripts and a C++ library. The configuration tool allows the definition of the data to be exchanged and their instantiation on different controllers within the control system. The scripts generate the resources necessary to the final communication while the library eventually allows the application on the master side to send and receive data to/from the different controllers. This paper describes the different components of this tool by focusing on its main objectives, namely: defining standard interconnection ways and clear communication interface between FECs and controllers; reducing user developments and configuration time.