LabVIEW as a New Supervision Solution for Industrial Control Systems

To shorten the development time of supervision applications, CERN has developed the UNICOS framework, which simplifies the configuration of the front-end devices and the supervision (SCADA) layer. At CERN the SCADA system of choice is WinCC OA, but for specific projects (small size, not connected to accelerator operation or not located at CERN) a more customisable SCADA using LabVIEW is an attractive alternative. Therefore a similar system, called UNICOS in LabVIEW (UiL), has been implemented. It provides a set of highly customisable re-usable components, devices and utilities. Because LabVIEW uses different programming methods than WinCC OA, the tools for automatic instantiation of devices on both the front-end and supervision layer had to be re-developed, but the configuration files of the devices and the SCADA can be reused. This paper reports how the implementation was done, it describes the first project implemented in UiL and an outlook to other possible applications.