Interfacing Epics and Labview Using Opc Ua for Slow Control Systems

The ability of EPICS-based control systems to adapt to heterogeneous architectures made EPICS the defacto control system for scientific experiments. Several approaches have been made to adapt EPICS to LabVIEW-based cRIO hardware but these approaches including NI EPICS ServerI/O Server: (1) require a lot of effort to maintain and run especially if the controllers and the process variables are numerous; (2) only provide a limited set of metadata; or (3) provide a limited set of EPICS features and capabilities. In this paper, we survey different solutions to interface EPICS with LabVIEW-based hardware then propose EPICS OPCUA device support as an out-of-the-box interface between LabVIEW-based hardware and EPICS to preserve most of EPICS features and provide reasonable performance for slow control systems.