First Experience with PLC, OPC and BridgeVIEW in the context of the HMPID liquid distribution prototype

The TESt (Test and Evaluation Station) [3] project consists in the construction of a stand alone unit for a specific sub-system of an ALICE detector in order to gain first experience with commercial products for detector control. Although the control system includes only a small number of devices and is designed for a particular application, it covers nevertheless all layers of a complete system and can be extended or used in different applications. <P> The control system prototype has been implemented for the Perfluorohexane (C<SUB>6</SUB>F<SUB>14</SUB>) liquid distribution of the ALICE-HMPID (High-Momentum Particle IDentification)[5]. <P> This report presents the experience acquired while developing the control system with off the shelf items: National Instruments BridgeVIEW [6] supervision software, SIEMENS PLC S7-300 [7] and the programming tool STEP 7. The OPC standard (OLE [12] for Process Control) [8] was used for the communication between BridgeVIEW and the PLC.