The CMS Tracker Detector Control System

The CMS Silicon Strip Tracker Detector Control System is a distributed software which ensures the safe and coherent operation of the detector, by controlling ≈ 2000 power supplies for the silicon modules and by monitoring more than 1000 environmental sensors. In this paper we first present the architecture of the control system and the characteristics of the controlled hardware, then we discuss some general strategies adopted in the implementation. We propose a method to give an effective representation for the state of a large but homogeneous system, stressing the necessity to provide the user with some quantitative information and presenting an effective algorithm to keep this information updated in real time. We also present the advantages of a new approach for the automatic analysis and recovery from error conditions via a wizard that relieves the experts from unnecessary and time-wasting work. The tracker was chosen as a use-case in a framework for automatic 3D GUI prototyping: some preliminary results of this study are presented here.