Profile control of advanced tokamak plasmas in view of continuous operation

The concept of the tokamak is a very good candidate to lead to a fusion reactor. In fact, certain regimes of functioning allow today the tokamaks to attain performances close to those requested by a reactor. Among the various scenarios of functioning nowadays considered for the reactor option, certain named 'advanced scenarios' are characterized by an improvement of the stability and confinement in the plasma core, as well as by a modification of the current profile, notably thank to an auto-generated 'bootstrap' current. The general frame of this paper treats the perspective of a real-time control of advanced regimes. Concrete examples will underline the impact of diagnostics on the identification of plasma models, from which the control algorithms are constructed. Several preliminary attempts will be described.