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09-04-2018
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WinCC OA, The Navigator

Submitter: Henk Mulder
Description: You may have heard somebody mention WinCC OA (or the Navigator) in the corridors, meeting rooms and plenaries a few times now. Or had a quick glance at it in the control-room. If you have not, you probably should take some time out of your schedule and have a look..

The LOFAR infrastructure has been monitored successfully all these years by a SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system, where all the details from software level, TBB boards, fan speeds, power levels, broken tiles, observations running (you name it..) are being displayed, trended, archived and alarmed. There is extensive daily System Health Management going on to make sure we get the best out of LOFAR, and for this we use the WinCC OA system by Siemens.

This is also the place where the Operators turn off (and on after repair) all the elements that have issues like oscillation, fallen over LBA antennas, summator noise, etc., and abort observations that have a mayor problem after they have started. They also use it to keep an eye on the stations in and outside the Netherlands and get alerted to critical system problems before they happen, like crashed software, full hard discs, failing Rubidiums/power supplies and other equipment in the field cabinets.

WinCC Open Architecture is a SCADA system for visualising and operating processes, data/production flows, machines and plants in many lines of business. For us it allows us to track and monitor thousands of data-points throughout LOFAR in one system. It is also used by countries and companies for giant projects like transportation systems, gas, water and energy distribution, or complete factory processes (for instance Gasunie and CERN). The whole CERN research installation including every data-point of all the installations over the 27-kilometer ring of the LHC is monitored and controlled by WinCC OA.

The monitoring is developed and designed in-house and is being updated constantly as LOFAR grows with each new station and upgrade. It has become a piece of monitoring software that is invaluable for making sure we keep LOFAR the best large telescope network.
Copyright: Henk Mulder, Arthur Coolen
 
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