This paper will discuss software engineering practices used to improve Control System reliability. We will begin with a brief discussion of the Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model (CMM) which is a framework for evaluating and improving key practices used to enhance software development and maintenance capabilities. The software engineering processes developed and used by ...

The Homeric epics are among the greatest masterpieces of literature, but when they were produced is not known with certainty. Here we apply evolutionary-linguistic phylogenetic statistical methods to differences in Homeric, Modern Greek and ancient Hittite vocabulary items to estimate a date of approximately 710-760 BCE for these great works. Our analysis compared a common set of vocabulary ite...

The relational device database for the EPICS control system of the ISAC Radioactive Beam Facility at TRIUMF is at the centre of generating EPICS data bases, operator display panels, and verifying PLC interlocks against specifications. For historical reasons, this database is implemented using Paradox on PCs with shared access to a file server. Use of the database is thus limited to PC nodes wit...

A portion of software components of the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS)[1] has been ported to a VME single board computer based on a PowerPC microprocessor. We have studied 1) the performance of a database scanning, 2) the Channel Access performance and 3) interrupt latency on the PowerPC based CPU board. The CPU load of the VME single board computer arising from the ...

The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) control system uses a nameserver to reduce system response time and to minimize the impact of client name resolution on front-end computers. The control system is based on the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS), which uses name-based broadcasts to initiate data communication. By default, when EPICS proces...

The Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) diagnostic instruments at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are based on the Network Attached Device (NAD) concept. Each pickup or sensor has its own resources, such as networking, timing, data acquisition, and processing. NADs function independently thus reducing the brittleness inherent in tightly coupled systems. This paper describes our implementation of the ...