A PVSS Application for Monitoring the Start-up of the Super Proton Synchrotron after Major Breakdowns

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are widely employed in monitoring and controlling technical facilities at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Various kinds of SCADA systems are used for the supervision of electricity, cooling, cryogenics and other systems as wells as for the control of the laboratory's particle accelerators and high-energy physics (HEP) experiments. This thesis is concerned with the development of a software application for two of CERN's main control rooms, for monitoring the start-up of the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), the laboratory's second largest particle accelerator. Following a CERN recommendation, the application is based on PVSS II, a commercial off-the-shell SCADA product that will replace the heterogeneous component architecture currently used for monitoring SPS equipment. The set-up of the SCADA system in a redundant, distributed and scattered manner in order to guarantee high dependability and the possibility of doing data exchange with external PVSS II systems is a central issue of this work. A PVSS Driver Manager to SL-Equip, a middleware allowing data exchange with heterogeneous remote devices located around the accelerator, is developed in order to communicate with SPS hardware. The object-oriented design and the C++ implementation of this driver are discussed in a detailed manner. Special attention is paid to the design and implementation of the application's user interface, for this is the part of the system that the control rooms' operators will be confronted with on a daily basis. A first prototype of this interface, consisting of a series of PVSS panels, is developed in close co-operation with the operators concerned. In addition to the application itself, an off-line database system for managing static PVSS configuration information is created. An integration strategy for existing configuration data is developed, a relational database structure for storing the information is designed and Perl scripts and PL/SQL procedures for data import and export are implemented.