Implementation of Node-RED as an Interface Platform for Accelerator Control Systems: A Comparative Study with EPICS and SCADA/LabVIEW

Abstract

The control room of a particle accelerator, including a cyclotron, plays a central role in monitoring and regulating operational parameters such as current, magnet voltage, and temperature. Because the complexity and cost of an actual control room are difficult for students and the public to access, an educational-scale cyclotron control room demonstration device was developed. This paper objectively describes how Node-RED, an open-source flow-based programming platform, was implemented as the interface-building software for the control system of the device, and compares its performance and reliability characteristics with platforms commonly used by researchers in real accelerator facilities, namely EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) and commercial SCADA/LabVIEW software. The method consisted of implementing a Node-RED dashboard connected through the MQTT protocol to display real-time system status, followed by a comparative literature study of other control platforms based on cost, ease of development, architecture/protocol, and system management scale. Implementation results show that the Node-RED dashboard was able to display data in real time and that all control and monitoring functions on the demonstration device ran without significant issues during testing. The comparative literature review shows that the three platforms have distinct characteristics and are not interchangeable in every respect: EPICS excels in managing very large-scale systems with thousands of process variables but demands high technical expertise; commercial LabVIEW/SCADA excels in industrial device integration and enterprise-grade features but carries high licensing costs and limited cross-vendor interoperability; while Node-RED excels in ease of development, low implementation cost, and communication-protocol flexibility, though its documented applications in the literature remain limited to small- to medium-scale systems compared with EPICS and industrial SCADA. The appropriate choice of platform ultimately depends on system scale, available resources, and the required level of management complexity.