Integration of industrial automation equipment in experiment control systems via PROFIBUS-developments and experiences at Forschungszentrum Julich

PROFIBUS, being a national German (DIN 19245) and an European (EN 50170) standard, has become the most widely accepted modern fieldbus technology in Europe. It is expected to rake a similar role on the world market, since the IEC standardisation efforts for a common international fieldbus failed recently. A major reason for its success is the technological and functional scalability based on a common core. Now, a wide range of PLCs as well as low cost process I/O is available (also from leading manufacturers like Siemens) which enable easy interfacing. ZEL, the central electronics facility of Forschungszentrum Julich, has decided to use predominantly industrial components (PLCs, I/Os, etc.) in the front end of slow control systems for physics experiments. Interfacing of these devices is accomplished by PROFIBUS controllers, that have been developed for PCI and CompactPCI with device drivers for Linux and LynxOS. Front end PROFIBUS controllers have been developed for integrating dedicated devices. On the base of two case studies-a nuclear experiment and a neutron scattering experiment-the paper describes this approach. Design of the PROFIBUS hardware and software as well as performance results are presented.