Use Cases and Market Value¶
SCPN Control is aimed at the gap between fusion-control research and facility promotion. Its value is not only that it can run controllers; it can attach claim boundaries, checksums, validators, formal evidence, and release artefacts to the result.
Primary users¶
| User | Pain point | SCPN Control value |
|---|---|---|
| Fusion control researchers | Controller prototypes are hard to replay and review. | Executable controller artefacts with formal and validation metadata. |
| Fusion startups | Need credible control evidence before hardware exists. | Digital-twin, public-data, and strict admission workflows for staged review. |
| Facility teams | New algorithms need safety and timing boundaries before PCS integration. | Fail-closed runtime contracts, HIL evidence hooks, and target-hardware gates. |
| Academic groups | Students need one package spanning control, physics facades, and safety evidence. | Tutorials, notebooks, API docs, and reproducible validators. |
| Funders and collaborators | Need to see which claims are real and which require external resources. | Public roadmap, compute-validation budget categories, and honest blocked gates. |
Application areas¶
Controller concept development¶
Use stochastic Petri nets, robust control, NMPC, SNN controllers, and phase monitoring to express candidate plasma-control policies. The formal-verification surface can check bounded marking, liveness, reachability, and temporal properties before the controller is promoted to replay or HIL workflows.
Safety-case preparation¶
The package emits hash-bound evidence for safety-critical controller artefacts, formal certificates, WebSocket runtime evidence, CODAC runtime evidence, FPGA export evidence, and target-hardware timing. These reports are designed to be inputs to a larger safety case, not replacements for facility approval.
Public-data and external-code validation¶
Recent validation tooling converts and evaluates public MAST EFM data for neural equilibrium reference-candidate work, while keeping predictive EFIT/P-EFIT claims blocked until all strict inputs are available. Similar validators exist for gyrokinetic, transport, MHD, disruption, and digital-twin surfaces.
Differentiable controller tuning¶
JAX-backed equilibrium, transport, and gyrokinetic parity surfaces make gradient information available to controller-tuning workflows. The repository admits backend parity and bounded gradients separately from full facility physics claims.
Digital twin with online updating¶
The digital-twin surface supports strict simulator metadata, Bayesian update records, and external TRANSP/TSC bridge contracts. The market value is staged: first reproducible replay, then target-hardware timing, then facility-specific admission.
Local-first physics debugging¶
The physics-debug assistant is designed for onsite use. It supports local providers first, optional hallucination guardrails, strict prompt-injection neutralisation, tamper-evident report digests, and human-review caps. Its output is advisory evidence, never automatic controller promotion.
Quantum-enhanced disruption research¶
The quantum-disruption bridge contracts prepare controller-side integration for SCPN Quantum Control without duplicating that repository. SCPN Control owns the admission boundary and disruption-control interface; quantum-kernel development can mature in the quantum repository and return as an evidence-bound provider.
Market position¶
SCPN Control is not trying to replace major physics suites. Its commercial and collaboration value is the control-evidence layer:
- faster iteration between controller idea and reviewable artefact;
- fewer unbounded claims in papers, grant proposals, and demos;
- clearer separation between local research evidence and facility readiness;
- explicit funding targets for data, hardware, and external-code validation;
- reusable interfaces for labs that need local or air-gapped workflows.
What a collaborator can fund or contribute¶
| Contribution | Repository outcome | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| GPU or HPC allocation | Executed training, latency, and uncertainty reports | Converts prepared pipelines into measured evidence |
| Public or facility data access | Immutable acquisition manifests and reference reports | Moves claims from bounded to reference-validated |
| External-code runs | Matched input decks, raw outputs, parsed metrics, and checksums | Closes gyrokinetic, transport, equilibrium, and digital-twin gaps |
| Target hardware | P50/P95/P99 timing and HIL replay reports | Separates local timing from deployment-relevant timing |
| Safety review | Independent review artefacts and requirement traceability | Makes formal evidence useful for facility processes |
| Documentation review | Better onboarding, tutorials, and claim wording | Lowers adoption friction and prevents overstated claims |
Why this is different from a solver repository¶
A solver repository tries to improve physical models. SCPN Control tries to make controller claims auditable. It can wrap or port selected solver contracts, but its distinctive value is the evidence path around controllers: fail-closed runtime boundaries, proof artefacts, replay metadata, benchmark admission, and release documentation that tells users what is ready, what is bounded, and what is blocked.
Current limitations¶
- No commissioned plant deployment is claimed.
- Full predictive EFIT/P-EFIT claims remain blocked until matched public or facility reference artefacts pass admission.
- Full cross-code gyrokinetic and integrated-modelling claims remain blocked where external artefacts are still missing.
- Hardware timing evidence must be collected on target platforms before real-time deployment claims are admissible.
For claim language, use Production Readiness as the source of truth.