Introduction

BEC is a Beamline Experiment Control system that relies on multiple small services for orchestrating and steering the experiment at large research facilities. The usage of small services allows for a more modular system and facilitates the long-term maintainability.

The system is designed to be deployed at large research facilities where the interoperability with other systems is a key requirement. As shown in the figure below, the system can be connected to other services such as an electronic logbook, a data catalogue / archiving solution or a data processing pipeline. More services can be added easily by using the provided bec library.

Multiple users can be connected to the system at the same time while the scan server uses a queue to schedule the requests received from users or other services such as feedback loops from automatic data-processing pipelines. This client-server architecture keeps the system responsive even under heavy load whilst providing the flexibility to adjust for future requirements.