Experience from ASDEX Upgrade discharge control management for long pulse operation

Preprogrammed discharge control method and static experiment scheduling traditionally used with short-pulse experiment operation cycles are not compatible with requirements aiming at (near) steady state operation. An event-driven discharge control method is needed to handle deviations from the experiment programme without terminating the discharge. A dynamic experiment scheduling method is required to insert or take away experiments in a running discharge. To support these methods to operate the machine, data acquisition needs a close integration into the control, supporting calculation and exchange of processed quantities and state information, and into the experiment operation, supporting self-monitoring and exchange of resource availability and configuration information. These functions must be performed in parallel with the concurrent execution of the data acquisitions front-end control, data sampling, data processing and reduction and archiving.