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proceedings of accelerator conferences held around the world
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| URL | https://doi.org/10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2025-THPD102 |
|---|---|
| Title | Continuous Integration meets industrial automation: testing industrial controls frameworks |
| Authors |
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| Abstract | Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines are a cornerstone of modern software development, enabling early bug detection and robust validation across all system layers. Extending this concept to industrial automation introduces unique challenges due to the involvement of real hardware and vendor-specific proprietary tools. This paper presents how CERN has built a fully automated testing pipeline for one of its industrial controls frameworks, covering every stage from framework releases (traditionally manual developer tasks), to end-to-end PLC-SCADA validation, simulating user workflows. The pipeline automates the generation of platform-specific PLC projects, the configuration of SCADA systems, and the establishment of the PLC-SCADA communication, achieved through a combination of in-house and third-party tools to programmatically execute these steps. Implementing such CI pipelines requires establishing a permanent testing infrastructure, including PLCs, development machines and SCADA servers. While the setup demands significant initial effort, the maintenance cost remains low, yielding high returns in the form of time saved for developers and testing engineers during the pre-release validation phases. This approach bridges the gap between modern software testing and industrial automation, enhancing reliability in complex, multi-platform environments. |
| Paper | download: THPD102.pdf |
| Cite | BibTeX, LaTeX, Text/Word, RIS, EndNote |
| Conference | 20th Int. Conf. Accel. Large Exp. Phys. Control Syst. (ICALEPCS'25) |
| Series | |
| Location | Chicago, IL, USA |
| Date | 20-26 Sep 2025 |
| Publisher | JACoW Publishing, Geneva, Switzerland |
| Editorial Board | Kent Wootton (ANL), Jeffery Biss (FNAL), Gustavo Bruno (ANL), Jeff Kirchman (ANL), Kelly Jaje (ANL), Denise Skiadopoulos (ANL), SuYin Grass Wang (ANL) |
| Online ISBN | 978-3-95450-255-4 |
| Online ISSN | 2226-0358 |
| Received | 04 September 2025 |
| Revised | 22 September 2025 |
| Accepted | 29 October 2025 |
| Issued | 25 November 2025 |
| DOI | 10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2025-THPD102 |
| Pages | 1837-1842 |
| Copyright | Published by JACoW Publishing under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s), the published article's title, publisher, and DOI. |