Easing the Control System Application Development for CMS Detector Control System with Automatic Production Environment Reproduction

The Detector Control System (DCS) is one of the main pieces involved in the operation of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the LHC. The system is built using WinCC Open Architecture (WinCC OA) and the Joint Controls Project (JCOP) framework which was developed on top of WinCC at CERN. Following the JCOP paradigm, CMS has developed its own framework which is structured as a collection of more than 200 individual installable components each providing a different feature. Everyone of the systems that the CMS DCS consists of is created by installing a different set of these components. By automating this process, we are able to quickly and efficiently create new systems in production or recreate problematic ones, but also, to create development environments that are identical to the production ones. This latter one results in smoother development and integration processes, as the new/reworked components are developed and tested in production-like environments. Moreover, it allows the central DCS support team to easily reproduce systems that the users/developers report as being problematic, reducing the response time for bug fixing and improving the support quality.