Advanced Control System (ACS)

Developed in cooperation with ESO with the needs of a wide range of astronomical and accelerator control projects in mind, the ACS is a framework for building complex control systems with data servers, process logic and management services. It uses and extends distributed computing and object-oriented concepts and significantly reduces developing and testing time  as well as increases reliability and maintainability.

ACS allows for the definition of  own types of controlled data and models of communication while providing powerful support libraries of ACS that do most of the work, as long as one adheres to some rules in the form of programming patterns. Like Abeans, ACS hides all the details of the underlying mechanisms, which use many complex features of CORBA, queuing, asynchronous communication, thread pooling, life-cycle management, etc.

Powerful remote management centralizes access to CORBA services and distributed objects, manages their full life-cycle including persistent store, supervises the state of the system, provides access to the configuration database, channels event logging, error handling, alarm reporting and similar.

ACS can run on many platforms and operating systems. The code compiles with the standard GNU cpp, including the sources of the CORBA implementation TAO, which is one of the fastest available. ACS is currently supported on MS WindowsTM, Linux and VxWorksTM.

More information about ACS can be found on ALMA Common Software web page.

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