Better automation of beamline control at HEPS

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development of simple, modular automation tools for beamline control at HEPS, aiming to reduce workload and enhance knowledge sharing across multiple beamlines.

Contribution

It introduces a packaging system, reusable modular IOC executables, and a comprehensive beamline service to streamline control and configuration management at HEPS.

Findings

Successful implementation of a packaging system for EPICS modules

Development of reusable modular IOC executables

Ongoing project to unify beamline configuration management

Abstract

At the High Energy Photon Source (HEPS) where up to 90 beamlines can be provided in the future, minimisation of workload for individual beamlines and maximisation of knowledge about one beamline that can be applied to other beamlines is essential to minimise the total complexity in beamline control. Presented in this paper are our efforts to achieve these goals by composing relatively simple utilities and mechanisms to automate tasks, and always remembering to keep our automation solutions simple and clear. After an introduction to our choice of basic software in EPICS-based beamline control, the issues encountered in introducing package management to EPICS modules, as well as our solutions to them, are presented; then the design and implementation of our packaging system is concisely discussed. After a presentation of our efforts to reduce the need for self-built multi-device EPICS IOC applications by providing reusable modular IOC executables, our implementation of easily maintainable multi-IOC setups through the separation and minimisation of each user's IOC configurations is given. Finally, the ongoing project of comprehensive beamline services at HEPS to further simplify configuration management on multiple scales, ranging from individual beamline devices to all beamlines at HEPS, is introduced.