Standardized Communication in the Control System of the Experiment WENDELSTEIN 7-X

The superconducting stellarator experiment WENDELSTEIN 7-X (W7-X) has a control system which has been designed for steady state operation as well as for pulsed operation. Each technical component and each "diagnostic" system including its data acquisition will have its own control system permitting autonomous operation for commissioning and testing. During the experimental sessions the activity of these components will be coordinated by a central control system and the machine runs more or less automatically with predefined programs. A local control component has a number of internal and external communication interfaces which are necessary for data exchange with the operational management system, the segment control system and with the safety system. These interfaces are used to send and receive messages of different types (commands, status information, raw data, and analyzed data). The paper presents a description of the structure of a local control component and a discussion of its communication interfaces.