The development of an interlock and control system for a clinical proton therapy system

Abstract

The development of a 200 MeV clinical proton therapy facility at the National Accelerator Centre required an interlock and control system to supervise the delivery of radiation to a patient. The interlock and control system is responsible for ensunng that nobody enters the treatment vault during an irradiation, the extraction of the beamstop devices 'from the beam-line to allow the irradiation of the patient and the insertion of those beam-stop devices when an error condition is detected. Because of its nature, the interlock and control system should be designed so that in the event of an error condition being detected, it should fail to a safe state. This is achieved by modelling the interlock and control system with an appropriate modeling method. This thesis describes a graphical modelling method called Petri-nets, which was used to model the system, and the software developed from the model.