Experiment planning using the high level parameter concept

One discharge at the steady-state experiment Wendelstein 7-X will last up to 30 min and will be divided into many elementary experimental program phases, so-called segments. Physics programs need to be planned and technical parameters need to be adjusted well before the discharge. The technical parameters provide a complete description for the behavior of all participating components.Physicists, however, aim at specifying the state and behavior of both plasma and machine in terms of physics. Therefore, an abstraction layer above the technical parameters has been developed, the so-called high level parameters. These specify a subset of the technical parameters on a higher, more physics-oriented level and are therefore used to encapsulate technical details. During ordinary program planning, the physicists and engineers only see and work with these high level (physics) parameters.In comparison to shot-based and other existing experiments, this is an entirely new scientifically oriented method to plan experiments in terms of physics parameters (supported by tools) which are automatically mapped onto technical parameters. Besides the introduction of the high level parameter concept, this paper shows the planning of experiment programs with high level parameters for the example of the WEGA (a small stellarator experiment) magnetic field. For this case, details about defining and editing these parameters as well as about the mapping of high onto low level (technical) parameters will be given. Furthermore, the support of these processes by specialized tools is described. In addition, other fields of high level parameter applications will be mentioned.