The Tore Supra control, computer system: six years of operation and improvements

Some necessary improvements of the Tore Supra control computer system are discussed. Their main principles are: to choose ergonomic and powerful tools, industrial standards, and to keep the users's participation. The whole control system will be upgraded: the automatism level as well as the display level and the communication networks. A very powerful driving software has been chosen and linked with an expert system, which is to be designed and implemented with the aim to give an immediate accurate and global understanding of the process and situations, in particular in case of trouble. The method is based on an artificial intelligence approach, and it exploits both the process' informations and automatism' steps, to determine the process state, next possible states and diagnosis of the process troubles. (author) 3 refs., 2 figs