XML for nuclear instrument control and monitoring: an approach towards standardisation

Communication among heterogeneous system with applications running under different operating systems and applications developed under different platforms has undergone rapid changes due to the adoption of XML standards. These are being developed for different industries like Chemical, Medical, Commercial etc. The High Energy Physics community has already a standard for exchange of data among different applications , under heterogeneous distributed systems like the CMS Data Acquisition System. There are a large number of Nuclear Instruments supplied by different manufactures which are increasingly getting connected. This approach is getting wider acceptance in instruments at reactor sites, accelerator sites and complex nuclear experiments -especially at centres like CERN. In order for these instruments to be able to describe the data which is available from them in a platform independent manner XML approach has been developed. This paper is the first attempt at Electronics Division for proposing an XML standard for control, monitoring, Data Acquisition and Analysis generated by Nuclear Instruments at Accelerator sites, Nuclear Reactor plant and Laboratory. The gamut of Nuclear Instruments include Multichannel Analysers, Health Physics Instruments, Accelerator Control Systems, Reactor Regulating systems, Flux mapping Systems etc. (author)