Wolf-Dieter Klotz

ITER CODAC status and implementation plan

CODAC (Control, Data Access and Communication) is the central control system responsible for operating the ITER device. CODAC interfaces to more than 160 plant systems containing actuators, sensors and local control. CODAC is responsible for coordinating and orchestrating the operation of these plant systems including plasma feedback control. CODAC is developed by ITER Organization, while plant systems are developed by the seven ITER parties (China, Europe, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and United States). This procurement model poses enormous challenges, has a big impact on architecture design and requires a strong standardization for better integration and future maintenance. In this paper we briefly describe the CODAC conceptual design, elaborate on the actions taken by the CODAC team to move from conceptual to engineering design during the last year and outline the plans ahead.

Baseline architecture of ITER control system

The control system of ITER consists of thousands of computers processing hundreds of thousands of signals. The control system, being the primary tool for operating the machine, shall integrate, control and coordinate all these computers and signals and allow a limited number of staff to operate the machine from a central location with minimum human intervention. The primary functions of the ITER control system are plant control, supervision and coordination, both during experimental pulses and 24/7 continuous operation. The former can be split in three phases; preparation of the experiment by defining all parameters; executing the experiment including distributed feed-back control and finally collecting, archiving, analyzing and presenting all data produced by the experiment. We define the control system as a set of hardware and software components with well defined characteristics. The architecture addresses the organization of these components and their relationship to each other. We distinguish between physical and functional architecture, where the former defines the physical connections and the latter the data flow between components. In this paper, we identify the ITER control system based on the plant breakdown structure. Then, the control system is partitioned into a workable set of bounded subsystems. This partition considers at the same time the completeness and the integration of the subsystems. The components making up subsystems are identified and defined, a naming convention is introduced and the physical networks defined. Special attention is given to timing and real-time communication for distributed control. Finally we discuss baseline technologies for implementing the proposed architecture based on analysis, market surveys, prototyping and benchmarking carried out during the last year.