Research And Development Of Software Configuration Management Tools For TMSR Control System

EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) is a non-commercialsoftware toolkits based on distributed control system architecture. It provides almost allfunctions for process control, supporting a number of non-standard control units, andcan be extended flexibly. It has been widely used in control systems of many scientificprojects, such as accelerator, synchrotron radiation, fusion, etc., and adopted by TMSR(Thorium-based Molten Salt Reactor) project to develop its control system as well.However, there is no unified management standard for EPICS softwareconfiguration at present, thus, resulting diversity of control software if developed bydifferent people in various ways. This made it difficult to perform system maintenance,management, and integration. This dissertation focused on the methods and techniquesof software configuration management for TMSR EPICS, and aimed to address someissues in the usage of EPICS and provide a basis for standardization and automation ofTMSR EPICS software platform.In the literature review of this thesis, the functionalities of computerized controlsystem and the developing history of software are introduced. The advantages anddisadvantages of EPICS compared with commercial SCADA (Supervisory Control andData Acquisition) products are discussed. Details of CODAC (COntrol Data Accessand Communication) software units developed by ITER (International ThermonuclearExperimental Reactor) are analyzed, so does the software management technologies inLinux environment. The main part of this thesis presents a way to deploy and invokeEPICS software modules automatically. The configuration management items ofEPICS run-time database are discussed especially, and a interface tool is developed toconfigure and manage EPICS run-time database. Finally, how to use the technologiesand interface tool in park radiation detection system of TMSR is demonstrated.The first contribution of the thesis is the implementation of deploying EPICSsoftware modules automatically with Shell programming and RPM（Red Hat Package Manager）on Linux. Through this method, a series of operation, such as downloading,packaging, installing, can be executed automatically by a simple command. Softwarepackages and scripts can be reused, thus it is very convenient to deploy softwaremodules to different PCs to act as different roles.Furthermore, a common interface has been designed to invoke services in Linux.Users can add any EPICS software service by using this interface, only needed to edita script, which contains the specified parameters for each software. Thus EPICSsoftware modules can be started，stopped，restarted in a uniform way.Another contribution of the thesis is the development of a generic configurationmanagement software tool for EPICS run-time database that can translate the static dataof I&C (Instrument and Control) to the configuration files. Some advanced softwaretechnologies, such as Eclipse, SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit), Hibernate, Oracle andXML (Extensible Markup Language) were utilized. This tool consists of HMI (HumanMachine Interface), data persistence and generation of configuration files, whichsatisfies collecting, memorizing and transforming the information of I&C variables.