Development of the ACS+OPC UA based control system for a CTA medium size telescope prototype

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is the next generation Very High Energy (VHE, defined as > 50GeV to several 100TeV) telescope facility, currently in the design and prototyping phase, and expected to come on-line around 2016. The array would have both a Northern and Southern hemisphere site, together delivering nearly complete sky coverage. The CTA array is planned to have ~100 telescopes of several different sizes to fulfill the sensitivity and energy coverage needs. Each telescope has a number of subsystems with varied hardware and control mechanisms; a drive system that gets commands and inputs via OPC UA (OPC Unified Architecture), mirror alignment systems based on XBee/ZigBee protocol and/or CAN bus, weather monitor accessed via serial/Ethernet ports, CCD cameras for calibration, Cherenkov camera, and the data read out electronics, etc. Integrating the control and data-acquisitions of such a distributed heterogeneous system calls for a framework that can handle such a multi-platform, multi-protocol scenario. The CORBA based ALMA Common software satisfies these needs very well and is currently being evaluated as the base software for developing the control system for CTA. A prototype for a Medium Size Telescope (MST, ~12m) is being developed and will be deployed in Berlin, by end of 2012. We present the development being carried out to integrate and control the various hardware subsystems of this MST prototype using ACS.