Plasma control systems relevant to ITER and fusion power plants

As a complement to ITER, the existing large and medium-size tokamaks are expected to explore more advanced operation scenarios compatible with a future power reactor. Specifically, the following urgent issues are required to be solved hopefully with an experimental demonstration: to work out one or more solutions to maintain a steady-state plasma with high performance (high beta and high bootstrap current fraction), and to suppress plasma instabilities almost completely. The developed solutions have to be confirmed using a DT burning plasma in ITER. In this article, we first review on system configurations and essential functions used for plasma control systems in existing tokamaks, from the viewpoint of technical inheritance of both hardware and software. Second, we discuss what plasma control system is relevant to ITER and fusion power plants from the two viewpoints: operation supervisor and plasma control tool. Finally, we will provide the current design of the ITER plasma control system.