The Detector Control System (DCS) provides control and monitoring of the detector hardware and ensures the safe and reliable operation of the detector, assuring good data quality. It requires to be able to handle a large variety of equipment with an enormous number of individual channels in which the design and implementation must provide a high level of scalability. The DCS has also to support different modes of operation, ranging from stand-alone running of components, e.g. for maintenance or calibration, up to coherent physics data taking. The SIMATIC WinCC is a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, a commercial package chosen by the Joint Control Project (JCOP) to develop the DCS system for all the LHC experiments.
The Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) DCS is a modular system in which 70000 parameters are controlled or monitored. The ATLAS Roman Pots (ARP) is composed by two forward detectors, Absolute Luminosity For ATLAS (ALFA) and Atlas Forward Protons (AFP), where the DCS main challenge is to cope with the large variety of equipment.
This seminar will describe the DCS and the WinCC tool in a general way and focus on the TileCal and ARP DCS systems from ATLAS.