Tuning and optimization at Brookhaven and Argonne: results of recent experiments

Vista Control Systems Inc. is developing a portable system for intelligent accelerator control. Our system is general purpose and has been designed to be reused at multiple accelerator facilities. This portability arises from the hierarchical object-oriented nature of the architecture. The control system employs a multi-level organization in which knowledge based inferencing is used to dynamically configure a variety of optimization and control algorithms. We discuss results from recent beamline tuning tests at the Brookhaven National Laboratory ATF and the ATLAS facility at Argonne. Results are analyzed along a number of dimensions, including portability, performance as benchmarked against human tuning, adaptive behavior, noise handling, integration of control subsystems, and support for rapid knowledge capture and utilization.