Vacuum Controls Configurator: A Web Based Configuration Tool for Large Scale Vacuum Control Systems

The Vacuum Controls Configurator (vacCC) is an application developed at CERN for the management of large-scale vacuum control systems. The application was developed to facilitate the management of the configuration of the vacuum control system at CERN, the largest vacuum system in operation in the world, with over 15,000 vacuum devices spread over 128 km of vacuum chambers. It allows non-experts in software to easily integrate or modify vacuum devices within the control system via a web browser. It automatically generates configuration data that enables the communication between vacuum devices and the supervision system, the generation of SCADA synoptics, long and short term archiving, and the publishing of vacuum data to external systems. VacCC is a web application built for the cloud, dockerized, and based on a microservice architecture. In this paper, we unveil the application’s main aspects concerning its architecture, data flow, data validation, and generation of configuration for SCADA/PLC.