User Interfaces and Tools
Paper Title Page
WEM308 A Multi-Modal Human-Machine-Interface for Accelerator Operation and Maintenance Applications 677
 
  • R. Bacher
    DESY, Hamburg, Germany
  
  The advent of advanced mobile, gaming and augmented reality devices provides users with novel interaction modalities. Today's accelerator control applications do not provide features like speech, finger and hand gesture recognition or even gaze detection. Their look-and-feel and handling are typically optimized for mouse-based interactions and are not well suited for the specific requirements of more complex interaction modalities. This paper describes the conceptual design and implementation of an intuitive single-user, multi-modal human-machine interface for accelerator operation and maintenance applications. The interface seamlessly combines standard actions (mouse), actions associated with 2D single/multi-finger gestures (touch sensitive display) and 3D single/multi-finger and hand gestures (motion controller), and spoken commands (speech recognition system). It will be an integral part of the web-based, platform-neutral Web2cToGo framework belonging to the Web2cToolkit suite and will be applicable for desktop and notebook computers, tablet computers and smartphones, and even see-through augmented reality glasses.  
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WEM309 A Graphical Tool for Viewing and Interacting with a Control System 681
 
  • J. Forsberg, V.H. Hardion, D.P. Spruce
    MAX-lab, Lund, Sweden
  
  This paper presents a graphical interface for displaying status information and enabling user interaction with the Tango based control system for the MAX IV synchrotron. It focuses on bringing an intuitive view of the whole system, so that operators can quickly access the controls for any hardware based on its physical location. The view is structured into different layers that can be selectively shown, and various live updated information can be displayed in the form of e.g. colour or text. Panning and zooming is supported, as well as invoking commands. The interface is defined by an SVG drawing which can be edited without programming expertise. Since our system is based on modern web technologies, it can be run as a web service accessible by standard browsers, but it can also be integrated in GUI applications.  
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WEPGF069 Integrating Web-Based User Interface Within Cern's Industrial Control System Infrastructure 861
 
  • A. Voitier, P. Golonka, M. Gonzalez-Berges
    CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
  
  For decades the user interfaces of industrial control systems have been primarily based on native clients. However, the current IT trend is to have everything on the web. This can indeed bring some advantages such as easy deployment of applications, extending HMIs with turnkey web technologies, and apply to supervision interfaces the interaction model used on the web. However, this also brings its share of challenges: security management, ability to spread the load and scale out to many web clients, etc… In this paper, the architecture of the system that was devised at CERN to decouple the production WINCC-OA based supervision systems from the web frontend and the associated security implications are presented together with the transition strategy from legacy panels to full web pages using a stepwise replacement of widgets (e.g. visualization widgets) by their JavaScript counterpart. This evolution results in the on-going deployment of web-based supervision interfaces proposed to the operators as an alternative for comparison purposes.  
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WEPGF132 An Update on CAFE, a C++ Channel Access Client Library, and its Scripting Language Extensions 1013
 
  • J.T.M. Chrin
    PSI, Villigen PSI, Switzerland
  
  CAFE (Channel Access interFacE) is a C++ client library that offers a comprehensive and easy-to-use Channel Access (CA) interface to the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS). The code base has undergone significant refactoring to make the internal structure more comprehensible and easier to interpret, and further methods have been implemented to increase its flexibility in readiness to serve as the CA host in fourth-generation and scripting languages for use at the SwissFEL, Switzerland's X-ray Free-Electron Laser facility. A number of specific design features are presented, including policies that provide control over configurable components that govern the behaviour of interactions, and the methodology that guarantees that the outcome of all remote method invocations are captured with integrity in every eventuality, thereby ensuring reliability and stability. An account is also given on newly created bindings for the Cython programming language, which offers a major performance improvement to Python developers, and on an update to CAFE's MATLAB Executable (MEX) file.  
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WEPGF133 TINE Studio, Making Life Easy for Administrators, Operators and Developers 1017
 
  • P. Duval, M. Lomperski
    DESY, Hamburg, Germany
  • J. Bobnar
    Cosylab, Ljubljana, Slovenia
  
  A mature control system will provide central services such as alarm handling, archiving, location and naming, debugging, etc. along with development tools and administrative utilities. It has become common to refer to the collection of these services as a 'studio'. Indeed Control System Studio (CSS)* strives to provide such services independent of the control system protocol. Such a 'one-size-fits-all' approach is likely, however, to focus on features and behavior of the most prominent control system protocol in use, providing a good fit there but perhaps offering only a rudimentary fit for 'other' control systems. TINE** is for instance supported by CSS but is much better served by making use of TINE Studio. This paper reports here on the rich set of services and utilities comprising TINE Studio.
* http://www.controlsystemstudio.org
** http://tine.desy.de 		 
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WEPGF135 Using the Vaadin Web Framework for Developing Rich Accelerator Controls User Interfaces 1025
 
  • K.A. Brown, T. D'Ottavio, W. Fu, S. Nemesure
    BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
  
  Funding: Work supported by Brookhaven Science Associates, LLC under Contract No. DE-SC0012704 with the U.S. Department of Energy
Applications used for Collider-Accelerator Controls at Brookhaven National Laboratory typically run as console level programs on a Linux operating system. One essential requirement for accelerator controls applications is bidirectional synchronized IO data communication. Several new web frameworks (Vaadin, GXT, node.js, etc.) have made it possible to develop web based Accelerator Controls applications that provide all the features of console based UI applications that includes bidirectional IO. Web based applications give users flexibility by providing an architecture independent domain for running applications. Security is established by restricting access to users within the local network while not limiting this access strictly to Linux consoles. Additionally, the web framework provides the opportunity to develop mobile device applications that makes it convenient for users to access information while away from the office. This paper explores the feasibility of using the Vaadin web framework for developing UI applications for Collider-Accelerator controls at Brookhaven National Laboratory. 		 
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WEPGF136 Development of iBeacon Based Equipment Inventory System at STAR Experiment 1029
 
  • J. Fujita, M.G. Cherney
    Creighton University, Omaha, NE, USA
  
  An inventory system using iBeacon technology has been developed. Using a specially written iOS app, makes the location of the equipment easier to a workers during the routine access to the experiment. The use of iBeacons and iOS devices allow us to distinguish one equipment rack from another very easily. Combined with 2D barcode, the use of iBeacons may provide better inventory management of the equipment for experiments.  
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WEPGF137 Adopting and Adapting Control System Studio at Diamond Light Source 1032
 
  • M.J. Furseman, N.W. Battam, T.M. Cobb, I.J. Gillingham, M.T. Heron, G. Knap, W.A.H. Rogers
    DLS, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
  
  Since commissioning, Diamond Light Source has used the Extensible Display Manager (EDM) to provide a GUI to its EPICS-based control system. As Linux moves away from X-Windows the future of EDM is uncertain, leading to the evaluation of Control System Studio (CS-Studio) as a replacement. Diamond has a user base accustomed to the interface provided by EDM and an infrastructure designed to launch the multiple windows associated with it. CS-Studio has been adapted to provide an interface that is similar to EDM's while keeping the new features of CS-Studio available. This will allow as simple as possible a transition to be made to using CS-Studio as Diamond's user interface to EPICS. It further opens up the possibility of integrating the control system user interface with those in the Eclipse based GDA and DAWN tools which are used for data acquisition and data analysis at Diamond.  
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WEPGF141 Tools and Procedures for High Quality Technical Infrastructure Monitoring Reference Data at CERN 1036
 
  • R. Martini, M. Bräger, J.L. Salmon, A. Suwalska
    CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
  
  The monitoring of the technical infrastructure at CERN relies on the quality of the definition of numerous and heterogeneous data sources. In 2006, we introduced the MoDESTI* procedure for the Technical Infrastructure Monitoring** (TIM) system to promote data quality. The first step in the data integration process is the standardisation of the declaration of the various data points whether these are alarms, equipment statuses or analogue measurement values. Users declare their data points and can follow their requests, monitoring personnel ensure the infrastructure is adapted to the new data, and control room operators check that the data points are defined in a consistent and intelligible way. Furthermore, rigorous validations are carried out on input data to ensure correctness as well as optimal integration with other computer systems at CERN (maintenance management, geographical viewing tools etc.). We are now redesigning the MoDESTI procedure in order to provide an intuitive and streamlined Web based tool for managing data definition, as well as reducing the time between data point integration requests and implementation. Additionally, we are introducing a Class-Device-Property data definition model, a standard in the CERN accelerator sector, for a more flexible use of the TIM data points.
*MoDESTI: Monitoring Data Entry System for the Technical Infrastructure
**TIM: Technical Infrastructure Monitoring 		 
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WEPGF142 Advanced Matlab GUI Development with the DataGUI Library 1040
 
  • S.M. Meykopff
    DESY, Hamburg, Germany
  
  On the DESY campus Matlab is a widely used tool for creating complex user interfaces. Although the on-board GUI tools are easy to use and provide quick results, the generated low-level code lacks uniformity and advanced features like automatic verification and conversion of input and output data. These limitations are overcome by the newly developed DataGUI library. The library is based on the model-view-controller software pattern and supports enhanced data handling, undocumented Matlab GUI elements, and configurable resizing of the user interface. An outlook on features of the upcoming release is also presented.  
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WEPGF145 A Structured Approach to Control System GUI Design for the Solaris Light Source 1044
 
  • V. Juvan, I. Dolin'ek, T. Humar, M. Pavleski
    Cosylab, Ljubljana, Slovenia
  • P.P. Goryl
    Solaris, Kraków, Poland
  
  In the framework of delivering control system services to the Solaris synchrotron light source, Kraków, Poland, Cosylab realized a comprehensive set of controls GUIs, using a structured approach. The goals of using this architecture are threefold. The first is to achieve reliable, predictable and consistent behaviour of the controls software. The second is that it is easy to deploy and maintain through scripting. The third is that it is future-proof by providing extensibility, using dedicated templates. The system is based on a configuration database, populated with devices, device specifics and device groups (clusters of devices performing specific operations). The GUIs are dynamically generated from this configuration. For the synoptic views, TANGO-standard JDraw and its configuration are integrated into the framework. Existing GUIs, written in PyTango can be easily adapted to function as part of this system. The compelling user benefits are high usability and life-time management through controlled upgrade and extension. For new big physics projects this GUI control program offers a customizable solution for any TANGO based control system.  
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WEPGF146 GUI Style Guide for Control System Applications at ESS 1047
 
  • F. Amand, M. Pavleski, M. Pleško
    Cosylab, Ljubljana, Slovenia
  • L. Fernandez
    ESS, Lund, Sweden
  
  To help developers create consistent-looking control system application GUIs, the European Spallation Source Integrated Control Systems group asked Cosylab to develop a Style Guide document. Its purpose is to avoid that GUIs needlessly diverge and make the end-result of all screens combined look harmonious, even if GUIs have been developed over several years by many contributors. Also it will speed up development, by letting developers start from design patterns, rather than starting "from a blank page". The document defines a set of basic panel sizes, containing a 960px-style grid for consistent organization of content. It also defines color scheme and font usage, in-line with the overall ESS corporate communications manual, with the addition of signal colors. In addition it shows example screens to serve as GUI design patterns for typical screen types such as engineering screens, control applications and synoptic screens. It concludes by setting rules and recommendations for the usage of automation symbols and display of engineering and physical units. The document is further complemented by a separate document with Usability Guidelines for Human-Machine interfaces.  
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WEPGF147 ALICE Monitoring in 3-D 1049
 
  • O. Pinazza
    INFN-Bologna, Bologna, Italy
  • A. Augustinus, P.M. Bond, P.Ch. Chochula, M. Lechman, J. Niedziela
    CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
  • A.N. Kurepin
    RAS/INR, Moscow, Russia
  
  The ALICE experiment is a complex hardware and software device, monitored and operated with a control system based on WinCC OA. ALICE is composed of 19 detectors and installed in a cavern along the LHC at CERN; each detector is a set of modular elements, assembled in a hierarchical model called Finite State Machine. A 3-D model of the ALICE detector has been realized, where all elements of the FSM are represented in their relative location, giving an immediate overview of the status of the detector. For its simplicity, it can be a useful tool for the training of operators. The development is done using WinCC OA integrated with the JCOP fw3DViewer, based on the AliRoot geometry settings. Extraction and conversion of geometry data from AliRoot requires the usage of conversion libraries, which are currently being implemented. A preliminary version of ALICE 3-D is now deployed on the operator panel in the ALICE Run Control Centre. In the next future, the 3-D panel will be available on a big touch screen in the ALICE Visits Centre, providing visitors with the unique experience of navigating the experiment from both inside and out.  
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WEPGF148 Unifying All TANGO Control Services in a Customizable Graphical User Interface 1052
 
  • S. Rubio-Manrique, G. Cuní, D. Fernández-Carreiras, C. Pascual-Izarra, D. Roldán
    ALBA-CELLS Synchrotron, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
  • E. Al-Dmour
    MAX-lab, Lund, Sweden
  
  TANGO is a distributed Control System with an active community of developers. The community features multiple services like Archiving or Alarms with an heterogeneous mix of technologies and look-and-feels that must be integrated in the final user workflow. The Viewer and Commander Control Application (VACCA) was developed on top of Taurus to provide TANGO with the user experience of a commercial SCADA, keeping the advantages of open source. The Taurus GUI application enables scientists to design their own live applications using drag-and-drop from the widget catalog. The VACCA User Interface provides a template mechanism for synoptic-driven applications and extends the widget catalog to interact with all the components of the control system (Alarms, Archiving, Databases, Hosts Administration). The elements of VACCA are described in this paper, as well as its mechanisms to encapsulate all services in a GUI for an specific subsystem (e.g. Vacuum).  
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WEPGF150 A HTML5 Web Interface for JAVA DOOCS Data Display 1056
 
  • E. Sombrowski, R. Kammering, K.R. Rehlich
    DESY, Hamburg, Germany
  
  JAVA DOOCS Data Display (JDDD) is the standard tool for developing control system panels for the FLASH facility and European XFEL. The panels are mainly started on DESY campus. For remote monitoring and expert assistance a secure, fast and light-weight access method is required. One possible solution is using HTML5 as transport protocol, because it is available on many common platforms including mobile ones. For this reason an HTML5 version of JDDD, running in a Tomcat application server, was developed. WebSocket technology is used to transfer the panel image to the browser. In the other direction, mouse events are sent back from the browser to the Tomcat server. Now thousands of existing JDDD panels can be accessed from remote using standard web technology. No special browser plugins are required. This article discusses the general issues of the web-based interaction with the control system such as security, usability, network traffic and scalability, and presents the WebSocket approach.  
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WEPGF152 Time Travel Made Possible at FERMI by the Time-Machine Application 1059
 
  • G. Strangolino, M. Lonza, L. Pivetta
    Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A., Basovizza, Italy
  
  The TANGO archiving system HDB++ continuously stores data over time into the historical database. The new time-machine application, a specialization of the extensively used save/restore framework, allows bringing back sets of control system variables to their values at a precise date and time in the past. Given the desired time stamp t0 and a set of TANGO attributes, the values recorded at the most recent date and time preceding or equaling t0 are fetched from the historical database. The user can examine the list of variables with their values before performing a full or partial restoration of the set. The time-machine seamlessly integrates with the well known save/restore application, sharing many of its characteristics and functionalities, such as the matrix-based subset selection, the live difference view and the simple and effective user interface.  
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WEPGF153 Karabo-GUI: A Multi-Purpose Graphical Front-End for the Karabo Framework 1063
 
  • M. Teichmann, B.C. Heisen, K. Weger, J. Wiggins
    XFEL. EU, Hamburg, Germany
  
  The Karabo GUI is a generic graphical user interface (GUI) which is currently developed at the European XFEL GmbH. It allows the complete management of the Karabo distributed control and data acquisition system. Remote applications (devices) can be instantiated, operated and terminated. Devices are listed in a live navigation view and from the self-description inherent to every device a default configuration panel is generated. The user may combine interrelated components into one project. Such a project includes persisted device configurations, custom control panels and macros. Expert panels can be built by intermixing static graphical elements with dynamic widgets connected to parameters of the distributed system. The same panel can also be used to graphically configure and execute data analysis workflows. Other features include an embedded IPython scripting console, logging, notification and alarm handling. The GUI is user-centric and will restrict display or editing capability according to the user's role and the current device state. The GUI is based on PyQt technology and acts as a thin network client to a central Karabo GUI-Server.  
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WEPGF154 Visualization of Interlocks with EPICS Database and EDM Embedded Windows 1066
 
  • E. Tikhomolov
    TRIUMF, Canada's National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics, Vancouver, Canada
  
  The control system for TRIUMF's upgraded secondary beam line M20 was implemented by using a PLC and one of many EPICS IOCs running on a multi-core Dell server. Running the IOC on a powerful machine rather than on a small dedicated computer has a number of advantages such as fast code execution and the availability of a large amount of memory. A large EPICS database can be loaded into the IOC and used for visualization of the interlocks implemented in the PLC. The information about interlock status registers, text messages, and the names of control and interlock panels are entered into a relational database by using a web browser. Top-level EPICS schematics are generated from the relational database. For visualization the embedded windows available in the Extensible Display Manager (EDM) are the EPICS clients, which retrieve interlock status information from the EPICS database. A set of interlock panels is the library, which can be used to show any chains of interlocks. If necessary, a new interlock panel can be created by using the visualization tools provided with EDM. This solution, in use for more than 3 years, has proven to be reliable and very flexible.  
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THHC3O01 The MeerKAT Graphical User Interface Technology Stack 1134
 
  • M. Alberts, F. Joubert
    SKA South Africa, National Research Foundation of South Africa, Cape Town, South Africa
  
  Funding: SKA South Africa National Research Foundation of South Africa Department of Science and Technology 3rd floor, The Park Park Road Pinelands ZA - Cape Town 7405 +27 21 506 7300
The South African MeerKAT radio telescope, currently being built some 90 km outside the small Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, is a precursor to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope and will be integrated into the mid-frequency component of SKA Phase 1. Providing the graphical user interface (GUI) for MeerKAT required a reassessment of currently employed technologies with a strong focus on leveraging modern user interface technologies and design techniques. An extensive investigation was performed to evaluate and assess potential GUI technologies and frameworks. The result of this investigative study identified a responsive web application for the frontend and asynchronous web server for the backend. In particular the AngularJS framework used in combination with Material Design principles, Websockets and other popular javascript layout and imaging libraries, such as D3.js, proved an ideal fit for the requirements of the MeerKAT GUI frontend. This paper will provide a summary of the user interface technology investigation and further expound on the whole technology stack adopted to provide a modern user interface with real time capabilities. 		 
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THHC3O02
 WebPODS: Accessing Control Data Through Web Standards (WebSockets, JSON, HTML, CSS)  
 
  • G. Carcassi, K. Shroff
    BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
  
  WebPODS is a set of tools to access and display soft real-time publish/subscribe data using Web standards. The server uses JSON encoding over WebSockets to push updates to the clients, which could include browsers, standalone Java/C applications or python scripts. A client Javascript is also provided, together with a number of HTML widgets that can be customized using standard CSS. The data layer used by the server is the same of Control System Studio, thus providing a broad and consistent set of functionality out of the box.  
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THHC3O03 Effortless Creation of Control & Data Acquisition Graphical User Interfaces with Taurus 1138
 
  • C. Pascual-Izarra, G. Cuní, C.M. Falcón Torres, D. Fernández-Carreiras, Z. Reszela, M. Rosanes Siscart
    ALBA-CELLS Synchrotron, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
  • T.M. Coutinho
    ESRF, Grenoble, France
  
  Creating and supporting Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) for experiment control and data acquisition has traditionally been a major drain of time and resources for laboratories. GUIs often need to be adapted to new equipment or methods, but typical users lack the technical skills to perform the required modifications, let alone to create new GUIs. Here we present the Taurus* framework which allows a non-programmer to create a fully-featured GUI (with forms, plots, synoptics, etc) from scratch in a few minutes using a "wizard" as well as to customize and expand it by drag-and-dropping elements around at execution time. Moreover, Taurus also gives full control to more advanced users to access, create and customize a GUI programmatically using Python. Taurus is a free, open source, multi-platform pure Python module (it uses PyQt for the GUI). Its support and development are driven by an active and welcoming community participated by several major laboratories and companies which use it for their developments. While Taurus was originally designed within the Sardana** suite for the Tango*** control system, now it can also support other control systems (even simultaneously) via plug-ins.
* Taurus Home Page: http://taurus-scada.org** Sardana Home Page: http://sardana-controls.org*** Tango Home Page: http://tango-controls.org 		 
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THHC3O04
 A Web-Based User Interface for MX1 and MX2 Beamline Data collection at the Australian Synchrotron  
 
  • L.M. Jong, D. Aragao, T. Caradoc-Davies, M. Clift, N. Cowieson, C.U. Felzmann, N. Mudie
    SLSA, Clayton, Australia
  
  The MX1 and MX2 beamlines at the Australian Synchrotron are single crystal diffraction beamlines, servicing the needs of protein and chemical crystallography communities. A web-based user interface for driving data collections, called YAIBEX (Yet Another Integrated Beamline Environment for Crystallography) has been developed. This system is designed to replace the collect tab on the SSRL BluICE system which is written in TCL language and was forked at deployment from the original code making it difficult to take advantage of bug fixes and improvements from the upstream. Our system utilises Flask, a minimalist Python web application framework, chosen to leverage the existing Python-based infrastructure existing at the beamline, the language's widespread use in the scientific community including existing libraries, and better support from the local Controls and Scientific Computing groups. Improvements on the existing system include integration with custom beamline libraries, user portal integration for pre-filling information and an easy, tabular layout to view a history of data collections for the current session and remote access directly in the user internet browser.  
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THHC3O05 National Ignition Facility (NIF) Experiment Interface Consolidation and Simplification to Support Operational User Facility 1143
 
  • A.D. Casey, E.J. Bond, B.A. Conrad, M.S. Hutton, P.D. Reisdorf, S.M. Reisdorf
    LLNL, Livermore, California, USA
  
  Funding: This work performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a 192-beam 1.8 MJ ultraviolet laser system designed to support high-energy-density science. NIF can create extreme states of matter, including temperatures of 100 million degrees and pressures that exceed 100 billion times Earth's atmosphere. At these temperatures and pressures, scientists explore the physics of planetary interiors, supernovae, black holes and thermonuclear burn. In the past year, NIF has transitioned to an operational facility and significant focus has been placed on how users interact with the experimental tools. The current toolset was developed with a view to commissioning the NIF and thus allows flexibility that most users do not require. The goals of this effort include enhancing NIF's external website, easier proposal entry, reducing both the amount and frequency of data the users have to enter, and simplifying user interactions with the tools while reducing the reliance on custom software. This paper will discuss the strategies adopted to meet the goals, highlight some of the user tool improvements that have been implemented and planned future directions for the toolset. 		 
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