Design of HUST-PTF beamline control system for fast energy changing

A proton therapy facility is under development at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST). To meet the need for fast energy changes during treatments, a beamline control system (BCS) has been designed and implemented. The BCS coordinates and controls various beamline devices by adopting a distributed architecture divided into three layers: the client, server, and device layers. Among these, the design of the server layer is the key to realize fast energy changes. The server layer adopts the submodule programming paradigm and optimizes the data interface among modules, allowing the main workflow to be separated from the device workflow and data. Furthermore, this layer uses asynchronous, multithreaded, and thread-locking methods to improve the system's ability to operation efficiently and securely. Notably, to evaluate the changing energy status over time, a dynamic node update method is adopted, which can dynamically adjust the update frequency of variable nodes. This method not only meets the demand for fast updates on energy changes but also reduces the server's communication load in the steady state. This method is tested on a virtual platform, and the results are as expected.