Workflow for the Assessment of ITER Plasma Control System Design

The plasma control system (PCS) for the first nonactive ITER operation phase will require simultaneous active monitoring and control of many continuous and discrete quantities. Considering the unique challenges ITER will face, all the controllers will be integrated and deployed with very little experimental time dedicated to PCS tuning and development. In order to maximize the efficiency of the ITER PCS design, a formal system engineering approach has been adopted. In a simplified way, the design process starts with the definition of the requirements. Functionalities are then designed and developed in order to meet these requirements. As a last step in the design process, it is important to assess that all the designed functionalities meet the associated requirements and that all the requirements are covered. The many different control functions will be designed and implemented in ITER PCS simulation platform (PCSSP) by different designing teams, both internal and external to ITER Organization. Although each team will be responsible for the independent assessment of the modules they deliver, an extra step is, nevertheless, necessary to guarantee that all the modules still continue to work when connected together. Therefore, integrated assessments will be built from independent assessments and will prove the controllers continue to meet the requirements. For this reason, it is necessary to have a unified workflow for the assessments performed by all the different designing teams. In fact, in order to guarantee a smooth integration assessment, it is important that all the assessments follow the same rules, use the same tools, are provided with the correct information, and are performed on the same platform. In this article, we present the proposed assessment workflow for ITER PCS components and some early impressions gathered from assessments of first delivered modules.