PRODUCT LINE ARCHITECTURE FOR HADRONTHERAPY CONTROL SYSTEM: APPLICATIONS DEVELOPMENT AND CERTIFICATION

Hadrontherapy is the treatment of cancer with charged ion beams. As the charged ion beams used in hadrontherapy are required to be accelerated to very large energies, the particle accelerators used in this treatment are complex and composed of several sub-systems. As a result, control systems are employed for the supervision and control of these accelerators. Currently, The Italian National Hadrontherapy Facility (CNAO) has the objective of modernizing one of the software environments of its control system. Such a project would allow for the integration of new types of devices into the control system, such as mobile devices, as well as introducing newer technologies into the environment. In order to achieve this, this work began with the requirement analysis and definition of a product line architecture for applications of the upgraded control system environment. The product line architecture focuses on reliability, maintainability, and ease of compliance with medical software certification directives. This was followed by the design and development of several software services aimed at allowing the communication of the environments applications and other components of the control system, such as remote file access, relational data access, and OPC-UA. In addition, several libraries and tools have been developed to support the development of future control system applications, following the defined product line architecture. Lastly, a pilot application was created using the tools developed during this work, as well as the preliminary results of a cross-environment integration project. The approach followed in this work is later evaluated by comparing the developed tools to their legacy counterparts, as well as estimating the impact of future applications following the defined product line architecture.