Experience from ASDEX Upgrade discharge control management for long pulse operation

Preprogrammed discharge control method and static experiment scheduling tra ditionally used with short-pulse experiment operation cycles are not compat ible with requirements aiming at (near) steady state operation. An event-dr iven discharge control method is needed to handle deviations from the exper iment programme without terminating the discharge. A dynamic experiment sch eduling method is required to insert or take away experiments in a running discharge. To support these methods to operate the machine, data acquisitio n needs a close integration into the control, supporting calculation and ex change of processed quantities and state information, and into the experime nt operation, supporting self-monitoring and exchange of resource availabil ity and configuration information. These functions must be performed in par allel with the concurrent execution of the data acquisitions front-end cont rol, data sampling, data processing and reduction and archiving. (C) 1999 E lsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.