The Technology Of Observing Control Process On LAMOST

LAMOST standing for the Large Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope is a large astronomical telescope built on the national astronomical observatory base in Xinglong, Hebei Province. LAMOST is one of the National Grant Scientific Projects in the Ninth Five-Year Plan period, successfully obtained completion acceptance on June 4th 2009, and it is the longest R&D period, the most innovative and the highest risk one between all the National Grant Scientific Projects at the same time. LAMOST has achieved a breakthrough in combining the large aperture with a wide field of view. Considering its area of integrating light and the number of fibers, the potential ability of LAMOST is 10 times higher than the best ones like SDSS and 2df, and is becoming a telescope with the highest spectral obtaining rate over the world. Building up of LAMOST brings our country to the international forefront of astronomical technology.OCS, the Observatory Control System, realize a full design of automatic process control, flexible change and security assurance for this multi-object spectroscopic telescope. Comparing with other large telescopes over the world, the observing process control design of LAMOST is very complete and more flexible.The all night long observing process of LAMOST contains lots of operational steps. To improve efficiency and make full use of limited available observing time, OCS has made a user oriented programmable process control design. Staffs can make up a process through drag and drop command elements on the UI. Process running is provided with a visual monitor. To cope with unpredictable online situation, OCS has appended a full set of manual interventions over automatic process running. The process service engine of OCS can start from any section of a process, and supports online mortifications, which adds great convenience for staffs.OCS grants staffs the free process programming ability, but arbitrary control is not correct. Open the focal-plane door before open the dome, and shift back focal-plane while doing S-H adjust. These controls are not only incorrect, but also dangerous to cause damage of the telescope. Considering this, OCS has designed a set of rule check as constraints to ensure security. All the rules are not unchangeable. As more experience gained by staffs, they can add more rules or change some of them.OCS generates logs of all the operations automatically. Over a period of trial observations by LAMOST, a lot of information is logged in records. Statistics of logs can help scientifically design timing monitor of workflows. Implementing the technique of workflow mining to logs, will generate graphic display of workflows, which facilitates the investigation of previous operations.Key innovations in this thesis are listed as follows:1) In the field of control system of large telescopes, automatic process control is limited configure mode. OCS realizes a flexible user-defined process control.2) OCS gives observers a full set of dynamic intervention and modification, which enable process control to cope with unexpected situation.3) OCS designs the user-defined rule check, which makes some constraints to free programmable process control to ensure security.Now, OCS has been applied to support the trial observations of LAMOST. Staffs use short workflows to control observatory processes of the telescope. As commissions increased for LAMOST, workflow control will play·a greater role by then.