A shared memory based interface of MARTe with EPICS for real-time applications

The Multithreaded Application Real-Time executor (MARTe) is a multi-platform C++ middleware designed for the implementation of real-time control systems. It currently supports the Linux, Linux+ RTAI, VxWorks, Solaris and MS Windows platforms. In the fusion community MARTe is being used at JET, COMPASS, ISTFOK, ETU and RFX in fusion [1]. The Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS), a standard framework for the control systems in KSTAR and ITER, is a set of software tools and applications which provide a software infrastructure for use in building distributed control systems to operate devices. For a MARTe based application to cooperate with an EPICS based application, an interface layer between MARTe and EPICS is required. To solve this issue, a number of interfacing solutions have been proposed and some of them have been implemented. Nevertheless, a new approach is required to mitigate the functional limitations of existing solutions and to improve their performance for real-time applications. This paper describes the design and implementation of a shared memory based interface between MARTe and EPICS. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.