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U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

EPICS architecture

Conference ·
OSTI ID:6110347
;  [1];  [2]
  1. Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States)
  2. Argonne National Lab., IL (United States)

The Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) was conceived to provide control and data acquisition for the experimental physics community. Because the capabilities required by the experimental physics community for control were not available through industry, we began the design and implementation of EPICS. It is distributed process control system built on a software communication bus. The functional subsystems, which provide data acquisition, supervisory control, closed loop control, archiving, and alarm management, greatly reduce the need for programming. Sequential control is provided through a sequential control language, allowing the implementer to express state diagrams easily. Data analysis of the archived data is provided through an interactive tool. The timing system provides distributed synchronization for control and time stamped data for data correlation across nodes in the network. The system is scalable from a single test station with a low channel count to a large distributed network with thousands of channels. The functions provided to the physics applications have proven helpful to the experiments while greatly reducing the time to deliver controls.

Research Organization:
Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
DOD; Department of Defense, Washington, DC (United States)
DOE Contract Number:
W-7405-ENG-36
OSTI ID:
6110347
Report Number(s):
LA-UR-91-3543; CONF-911116--9; ON: DE92003858
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English