Evaluating the control software for CTA in a medium size telescope prototype

CTA (Cherenkov Telescope Array) is one of the largest ground-based astronomy projects being pursued and will be the largest facility for ground-based γ-ray observations ever built. CTA will consist of two arrays (one in the Northern hemisphere and one in the Southern hemisphere) composed of telescopes of several sizes. A prototype for the Medium Size Telescope (MST) of a diameter of 12 m will be installed in Berlin by the end of 2012. This MST prototype will be composed of the mechanical structure, drive system and mirror facets mounted with powered actuators to enable active control. Five Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) cameras and a weather station will allow the measurement of the performance of the instrument. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) Common Software (ACS) distributed control framework is currently being considered by the CTA consortium to serve as the array control middleware. In order to evaluate the ACS software, it has been decided to implement an ACS-based readout and control system for the MST prototype. The design of the control software is following the concepts and tools under evaluation within the CTA consortium, like the use of a Unified Modeling Language (UML) based code generation framework for ACS component modeling, and the use of OPen Connectivity-Unified Architecture (OPC UA) for hardware access. In this contribution, the progress in the implementation of the control system for this CTA prototype telescope is described.