COSY Control Status. First results with rapid prototyped man-machine interface for accelerator control

Abstract The experience gained with the COSY Control System after a six month commissioning period followed by a six month production period will be presented. The COSY Control System runs approximately 300 VME and VXI target systems using a total of about 1000 CPUs, the systems are driven by the diskless operating environment RT/OS, hosted by eight workcells. Application software is implemented using Object-Orientated programming paradigms. All accelerator components become interface functions as instances of an abstract device model class. Methods defined here present an abstract picture of the accelerator giving immediate access to device states and parameters. Operator interaction is defined by building views and controllers for the model. Higher level functions, such as defining an acceleration cycle, are easily developed and modified with the accelerator connected on-line to the model. In the first year of COSY operation the object based approach for a control system, together with a rapid prototyped man-machine interface has brought to light the potential of new functions such as on-line, real time programming on a running system yielding high programming performance. The advantages of this approach have not been, until now, fully appreciated.