Since March the operators in the CERN Control Centre (CCC) have used the Technical Infrastructure Monitoring (TIM) Video Viewer (TVV) to provide access to the PS tunnel. It is now planned to use this application from this summer to control access to the SPS tunnel.
The TIM system was developed by the ASE group in the GS Department as a monitoring system for CERN's technical services. The system is able to collect data from different industry-standard hardware and software components, such as Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) for Process Control (OPC) servers or CERN proprietary protocols. The core part of TIM is implemented with Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technology to create a highly available, reliable, scalable and flexible control solution. It has been in production since 2006 and currently processes more than 1.7 million monitoring values per day. Several client applications were built on top of TIM for processing, visualizing and analysing these data.
A new video system was required in the PS tunnel because all of the old analogue cameras were replaced by digital models. The decision to use the TIM system as a framework for the video system was made after a careful evaluation of proposals from external companies, which were all deemed too complex in design as well as too expensive.
Using the existing TIM infrastructure, the GS-ASE-SSE section was able to develop the TVV within a very short time period. It is completely written in Java and designed so that the underlying video viewer can be exchanged easily if needed in the future. The integration into TIM allowed the creation of a remote interface that provides visual feedback on linking process data with video streams. The GUI design was kept simple and intuitive but it is still able to display up to five video streams of calls from people waiting for access. Furthermore it shows the operators how many people have registered to enter or leave the tunnel. For security reasons the TVV does not have any control functionality. It is completely event-driven by signals coming from the access doors or from a button control panel in the CCC. All of the control signals are provided through PLCs to TIM, and are then forwarded via the Java Messaging Service (JMS) to the TVV without any perceptible time delay. The video streams are MPEG4-encoded for superior image quality as well as low resource consumption.
Due to the success of the TVV for the PS access, the SPS tunnel access will also start using this system during the summer, before the LHC begins.
Useful links
TIM homepage: http://timweb
TIM Video Viewer user manual: http://timweb/wiki/doku.php?id=documentation:tim-video-viewer