Two CERN openlab fellows sponsored by Siemens and part of the ICE (Industrial Controls and Electronics) group in the EN (Engineering) Department at CERN gave presentations for the first time at the CERN openlab Technical Minor Review Meeting.

The first presentation, by Filippo Tilaro, focused on security standards convergence and relevance in Process Control Systems (PCS). Filippo presented the reasons, scope and objectives of the security analysis conducted by the team, giving at the same time a quick overview of the CERN strategy in terms of PCS. He continued by presenting a review of existing standards. Filippo concluded by pointing out the advantages of the ISA-99 standard compared to the other standards presented, and by referring to the team's future plans related to security deficiencies.

Omer Khalid presented the work of the team on the automated deployment of Siemens software. He started his presentation with a focus on the Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) used at CERN as part of the LHC control equipment, and gave further details about Step7 IDE (Integrated Development Environment) used in order to engineer and program solutions to automation problems. Omer insisted on the key objectives of this project which are to bring-in modern software engineering capabilities to Step7 product line and to automate the deployment of Siemens software (Step7 initially) on groups of machines. He detailed the approach followed to reach these objectives. A market survey of the available tools is being compiled and a survey to gather Step7 deployment experience was sent to PLC users at CERN. Meetings and brainstorming sessions with EN-ICE-PLC section are also organised. The complete results and analysis are expected to be presented to Siemens by the end of August 2009.

Next CERN openlab Minor Review Meeting will be hold on 16 June 2009.

Mélissa Le Jeune, CERN openlab