What is UCAP?

The Unified Controls Acquisition and Processing (UCAP) Framework provides, as the name suggests, a means to facilitate and streamline acquisition of Controls data for processing, before making the outputs available via the standard Controls Middleware (CMW).

In UCAP, as shown in the figure above, the inputs, processing and outputs are referred to as:

Acquisition → Transformation → Publishing

The Transformation mentioned above, is essentially a running program that receives input signals and calculates outputs, which are then Published.

A key feature of UCAP is that provides an easy means for end-users, such as domain experts, to configure the data Acquisition and Publishing layers, and to implement domain specific processing logic applied in the Transformation stage.

How is UCAP made?

The UCAP Core Framework is developed using Java and its eco-system and make use of standard Controls services like Controls Middleware (CMW), and the Controls Configuration Service (CCS) is used for configuring devices and Event Builders. It connects to Controls Devices of different types, which are typically developed by Equipment Experts using the Front-End Software Architecture (FESA).

The user code running inside the Transformations can be developed using either Java or Python.