THE PHELIX CONTROL SYSTEM BASED ON UML DESIGN LEVEL PROGRAMMING IN LABVIEW

Figure 1: Schematic view of the PHELIX setup. The high voltage capacitor bank is located in the upper floor. The beamlines to the experiments are only denoted. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) [1] has become the standard for documentation and high level design of modern software. UML to code generators like Rational Rose, Together, Rhapsody etc., allow to convert the UML diagrams to text based languages like C++ or Java and vice versa. Instead of converting the UML graphs to another programming language prior to its use, it is much better if the UML diagram itself is already executable. This is made possible by the third party toolkit ObjectVIEW [2] which can be used within the graphical language LabVIEW [3]. As an example of this approach the application layer of the control system of the PHELIX, Petawatt High Energy Laser for heavy Ion eXperiments [4], facility at GSI is presented.