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Tools for application management at Jefferson Lab
The Software Controls Group at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) is responsible for slow controls for many Jefferson Lab facilities. The Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) is used as the basis of these control systems. The Controls Group developed and maintains over 150 control applications running on over 100 I/O controllers (IOCs). With so many applications, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain and upgrade older applications and still produce new applications. The difficulties became especially apparent this year as a major effort was undertaken to upgrade all control system applications to the newest versions of EPICS and VxWorks. Over the past few years, the Controls Group has worked on constructing a framework within which to develop and maintain applications more efficiently. As the framework has matured and applications have been structured to fit the framework, a number of tools have been developed to help with software maintenance and upgrades. This paper will describe some of these tools and how they are used to enhance the maintainability and reliability of the control system