The ASTRI Mini-Array is an international collaboration led by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and devoted to imaging atmospheric Cherenkov light for very-high γ-ray astrophysics, and stellar Hambury-Brown intensity interferometry. The project is deploying an array of nine Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes of a 4-m class at the Teide Observatory in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. These telescopes are sensitive to γ-ray radiation with energies in the range from a few hundreds of GeV to 100 TeV and beyond. The Array will be managed remotely by the Operator from control rooms at different Array Operation Centers (AOCs) located remotely at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias facilities in La Laguna (Tenerife), at different remote INAF locations in Italy and one at the Teide site to be used during the installation and commissioning phases. To allow this remote control of the Array, a Data Center is being built on-site, and the ASTRI software team, an international collaboration that includes INAF members, the AC3E of the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María and the University of Geneve, is developing the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) software systems to perform all the actions required to operate the telescopes remotely.
This contribution describes the overall software architecture and engineering approach to develop the SCADA system.
SCADA controls and monitors the array of telescopes, the observing site systems, the site infrastructure, and the safety and security systems installed at the Array Observing Site, acquire the data from the telescope and perform a quick-look of them.
Thanks to the high-speed networking connection to the Teide site, an Operator supervises SCADA through an Operator Human Machine Interface (Operator HMI) web interface. However, the system performs the operations automatically. SCADA allows remote access, monitoring, and control of the on-site systems, including automated reactions to critical conditions. The Archive System is synchronised between the on-site at Teide and the permanent off-site archiving at the Rome Data Center. It provides a central repository for all persistent information of the ASTRI Mini-Array, such as observing projects, observation plans, raw and reduced scientific data, monitoring data, system configuration data, and logs of all operations and schedules. It provides the main inputs and stores the main outputs of the SCADA system.
We deployed the first releases of the SCADA system in the on-site data centre, which is updated with incremental releases. Frequent releases ensure that each increment of the software can be tested and integrated with the available on-site hardware, allowing for early identification of issues. Current planning foresees a minor software release every two months and a major one every eight months, including an Operational Readiness Review for major releases. Now, it is possible to r