ITER Plant Systems Instrumentation and Control:Status and Future plans

ITER Plant will be comprised of various types of Plant Systems with their Instrumentation and Control (IC) Systems with different levels of complexities. All these Plant Systems are required to operate in harmony in such a way as to make ITER Plant as a monolith which can be controlled and operated from a central control room. The CODAC (Control, Data Access and Communication) System is such a distributed control system that is being developed by ITER for this purpose. The ITER Plant Systems IC is comprised of necessary hardware and software to operate the Plant System in a local autonomous mode as well as centralized operation from CODAC System. The architecture of these Plant systems IC is conceptualized in 3-different vertical tiers- Conventional Plant Control System, Plant Interlock System (PIS) and Plant Safety Systems (PSS) to fulfill the ITER specific machine protection and safety requirements. All these ITER Plant Systems along with their IC Systems will be procured 'in-kind' from the ITER Partner Countries. Maintenance, upgrading and obsolescence management issues for ITER Plant Systems IC become very crucial and critical. IC hardware and Software having very rapidly changing technology have very short product life cycles, so ITER wide standardization of these systems is essential to keep them in a state of high availability during all these long years of operation, maintenance and upgrading. These IC systems can be classified broadly into two main categories: 1) Plasma diagnostic IC systems for plasma parameter measurement including plasma feedback control, and 2) Standard industrial IC systems. ITER Plant Systems may contain any one or mix of both of these types of IC systems. This Presentation highlights current CODAC group activities on standardization and future road-map for the development and procurement plans for the ITER Plant Systems IC based on well-proven long lasting technologies; Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC), Field-buses and industrial communication networks. This document is composed of an abstract followed by the presentation slides. (authors)