One of ITER Organization’s goals is to develop an integrated simulator of the different systems making up the ITER experimental reactor under construction in Cadarache (France). The simulator is meant to bring together the individual simulators developed in the different systems and integrate them. The final purpose of the integrated simulator is to support the commissioning of ITER and the training of operators.
The ITER team responsible for the cryogenics system has been working for some time on developing models that can verify the design, design advanced control algorithms and test the control with hardware simulations in the loop.
With this aim, the simulation department at EAI has developed dynamic models of the circuits that cool the ITER magnets and initial models for the cryogenic pumps and their distribution.
Because of the complexity of the system, IO has proposed creating a distributed simulation platform that can integrate models from the different subsystems and simulate them jointly. To achieve this goal, EAI developed some particular features in EcosimPro in 2017 to allow distributed simulation of these highly complex models.
In the framework of this project, EAI endowed EcosimPro with the capability of generating OPC UA servers from the tool itself. This lets models developed in EcosimPro connect to other tools that have an OPC UA interface and create a powerful distributed simulation platform. Similarly, a mechanism for synchronizing models has been developed that links up many different systems so that they can be simulated all together as a whole, with the results displayed in EcosimPro in a unified way.