CASESTUDY

TCS' Control Systems Architecture Will Power the World's Largest Radio Telescope

Abstract

To explore the origins and journeys of celestial bodies, Indian research organization National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA) of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), collaborated with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and a consortium of global agencies on setting up the world's largest radio telescope, called the square kilometer array (SKA). The telescope gets its name from the approximately one square kilometer collecting area it will boast of once fully operational. Featuring two sets of instruments – in Australia and South Africa – SKA will be run from the project headquarters in the UK. NCRA-TIFR and TCS together developed this telescope set's central nervous system – the control systems that will power it.

Client

National Centre for Radio Astrophysics – Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

Industry

Engineering and Industrial Services

Offering

Control systems architecture; Domain-specific engineering platform

Business Challenge

SKA is an extremely complex instrument made up of thousands of receivers, and it processes complex signal and data inputs across multiple observational modes to generate petabytes of data. The challenge was to create a single control systems solution that would be able to control the scopes at both locations, although they differ not only in hardware, but also in several aspects of the fundamental control paradigm.

What was needed was a distributed control system spanning three continents that could support the evolution of capabilities and technologies over the anticipated 50-year lifetime of the telescopes. There were also engineering challenges associated with coordination across distributed international teams within the control systems consortium, and management of interfaces with the consortia developing the other telescope subsystems.

TCS' Solution

Changes made to the control systems of large instruments over the latter’s lifetime require substantial manual effort and cycle time. For large systems, it is additionally challenging to achieve accuracy and consistency across the hundreds of thousands of specification items needed to capture the control logic and interactions for every system component.

For SKA, TCS Research and Innovation (R&I), with the help of the TCS Engineering and Industrial Services team (EIS), enforced two solutions. For starters, TCS developed and patented a systematic approach for designing an intuitive domain-specific language (DSL) for specifying the control systems logic. In addition, the teams designed an environment for engineering solutions that automated the engineering lifecycle, including modelling, code generation, knowledge-driven simulation, and verification.

Manual development and evolution of control systems solutions results in low agility due to latency and the high effort cost required to introduce improvements to the solution. Since it is the control software that integrates subsystems to deliver overall instrument capabilities, this means that the instrument cannot take advantage of technological improvements until the control systems software has been rewritten and verified.

The TCS solution environment not only ensures accuracy of changes and instrument reliability, but also provides automated generation of simulation and test environments based on the updated systems model. This means that changes can be implemented, verified, and deployed rapidly. TCS has consolidated this solution into a domain-specific engineering platform (DSEP) that can automate control systems realization for IoT- and robotics-based complex systems.

The SKA project and platform development engagement also required TCS to address a major research challenge – that of understanding how multiple disciplines come together in a system. For example, radio telescope design requires knowledge of interferometry, signal processing, algorithmic data processing, design of high-precision clocks and reference signals, mechanical engineering of antennas, civil infrastructure engineering, networking, computational infrastructure, and control systems.

Although models can be designed for each of these domains, and an overall systems solution created, all the domain-specific models cannot be integrated to form a transdisciplinary model of the whole complex system. TCS developed a hypothesis to explain the nature of relationships between knowledge domains in systems, and collaborated with researchers from NCRA-TIFR on pilot efforts to explore and refine these theories by application to the models of GMRT and SKA.

About the Client

NCRA-TIFR is one of India's premier institutes for radio astrophysics. The organization has made several major astronomical discoveries, ranging from pulsars and radio galaxies, to the early universe. Its Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) is one of the world's best instruments for observing the universe at meter wavelengths. GMRT has also been designated as a pathfinder for the SKA project.

CASESTUDY

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Results

The TCS R&I team’s participation enabled NCRA-TIFR and India to demonstrate leadership in the Telescope Manager consortium. As part of the SKA critical design review (CDR) process, TCS’ control systems architecture and design was reviewed by an international panel led by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). The solution received glowing feedback and was approved and accepted at the review stage. The NCRA-TIFR and TCS team was also the first SKA subsystem unit to complete the CDR, delivering its low-cost solution right on time.

TCS also initiated the creation of a community of practice spanning all the control systems teams across the project, in order to ensure commonality of technology platforms and engineering approaches. Each SKA subsystem includes local monitoring and control solutions and is diverse in its functionality. So, TCS defined a standard control interface between the Telescope Manager and each subsystem, enabling the adoption of a common project-wide control platform, standard design patterns, and consistent control systems architecture.

CASESTUDY

To build a project at such a mega scale, the in-house expertise of engineers and scientists in our labs was not sufficient.The contribution of the TCS Research team was very valuable in achieving the common objective of designing the Telescope Managerfor SKA.

Prof. Yashwant Gupta,Centre Director,

National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, TIFR

TCS

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