CERN Accelerating science

Documentation System for WinCC OA applications

Date published: 
Thursday, 6 October, 2016
Document type: 
Summer student report
Author(s): 
E. Tapta
Most of the control system applications that are used at CERN are developed with the use of different pieces of software. One of them is WinCC OA, a commercial SCADA tool developed by Siemens. The others are frameworks, like JCOP and UNICOS that were written at CERN and are built and run under the context of WinCC OA. The other one is the JCOP framework, a tool that is written at CERN and is built and runs under the context of WinCC OA. However, while these tools are co-dependent, they have completely separate sets of documentation. WinCC OA, in particular, uses a powerful help system that is built with tools that are provided by the Qt and Qt help framework. On the other hand, JCOP uses Doxygen to generate its documentation from annotated code sources. This documentation is later displayed in HTML pages that are installed locally in the computer and provide very little functionality. The main challenges of this project are as follows (1) to find a way to properly integrate the existent documentation into the help browser that is used by WinCC OA; (2) while also finding solutions that would give the help system more functionalities than were available before. Keywords: WinCC OA, SCADA, JCOP, UNICOS, Doxygen, Qt, Qt help