A Framework for a General Purpose Intelligent Control System for Particle Accelerators. Phase II Final Report

Abstract

Vista Control Systems. Inc. has de~eloped a portable system for intelligent accelerator control. Our design is general in scope and is thus conf&urable to a wide range of accelerator facilities and control problems. The control system employs a multi-layer organization in which knowledge-based decision making is used to dynamically cordlgure lower level optimization and control algorithms. An object-oriented physical access layer (PAL). supported by the Vsvstem control database. allows abstraction from the lower level details of hardtvare manipulation. signai processing, and synchronization. A teleo-reactive sequencing mechanism is used to coordinate control actions. This architecture has been implemented in two deployed Wstems. one for automated accelerator tuning at the Brookhaven ATF and one for Argonne ATLAS. Several weeks of field testing at these two facilities have yielded very promising results. We describe the technical details of this architecture as well as our experiences in field testing in this report. Historicu[ overview.The goal of this project was to design and prototype a portable intelligent control system for particle accelerators. The design was required to be general and to involve the assembly of general components, in order to expedite porting of the control system to new facilities. The design was intended to support robust adaptive behavior, in order to address weakly modeled systems, and to replace the role of human operators in performing the tuning and adaptations necessary to realize system objectives in everyday operations.The initial strategy for achieving these goals was to incorporate "intelligent" and "soft computing" technologies, expert systems, fuzzy logic, neural networks, genetic algorithms, etc. The challenge was to incorporate these technologies into a principled and systematic design that combines both conventional and intelligent control methods. The design that emerged from Phase I research and that was developed in Phase 11was hierarchical, distributed, and object-oriented.