Technological migration strategies for LabVIEW

This is the main entry point for the discussion of the NI Enterprise Agreement after 14.12.2025 and technological implications to HGF centers.

To prescribe a common direction and help each other, we opened this group and also a communication channel via Mattermost for all interested HGF-employees, that are faced with those questions: https://mattermost.hzdr.de/signup_user_complete/?id=e1tdo1jwpjfpmeregsoipc1ndc&md=link&sbr=su

Background

Since years there is no progress in the development of usefull LabVIEW modules, e.g. DSC, Vision, and some have been depricated, e.g. Motion. Serious bugs were introduced. Bugs are not fixed in the current version, but fixes are promised for future versions only. Quality and responsiveness have been decreased dramatically over the last few years. We are spending tax money! What do we really pay for?

HGF has to face the risk of another significant increase of license fees for the next contract.

The following questions arise:

• Is HGF able to freeze NI software at version available in Dezenber 2025?
• Can HGF live with previously bought licenses?
• At least GSI is willing to end the Enterprise Agreement.

Compared to the individual Institute Campus License Agreements (ICLA) before 15.12.2020 NI is able to enforce significant increase of license fees. NI requested quaterly NI-VLM reports from the HGF centers to monitor the usage of NI software. The results are not reported to HGF or individual centers. So, the usage can be evaluated by every center on its own, only. The usage of NI software within the duration of this contract period will have unknown influence on the license fee for the next period since no details were negotiated.

Inflation of license usage has been high since then. Furthermore NI was recently bought by Emerson. It's reasonable that the shareholder of Emerson expect some return of invest and therefore increased license fee for the Enterprise Agreement.

Empfehlung des Arbeitskreises "Koordinationsausschuss Datenverarbeitung (KODA)":

• „Das Überschreiten der Lizenzzahl oder besser formuliert der Zuwachs an genutzten Lizenzen ist für die Laufzeit zunächst egal und gewollt, aber am Ende der Laufzeit sollte es aber keinen Megazuwachs gegeben haben, sonst wird die neue Periode der ULA ab dem 6. Jahr ggf. entsprechend teurer!“

• „Generell ist die HGF-Zentren Strategie möglichst die Nutzung von LabView zu reduzieren, das sollten wir für die Zukunft berücksichtigen um unangenehme Überraschungen nach Ablauf eines evtl. jetzt abgeschlossenen Rahmenvertrags zu vermeiden.“

Inventory survey

A survey License usage seems to be necessary.

• Which and how many licenses are in the inventory of the HGF centers, meaning bought before 15.12.2020 and were state in the correspnding contract annex?
• Following centers have entries in the annex: DLR, FZJ, HZDR, GSI.
• All other centers may need to buy subscription licenses from NI with catalog price.

Migration Proposals - !!Under development!!

Some groups have evaluated migration strategies or have already successfully migrated LabVIEW projects using free open source alternatives.

Open source and free software alternatives for the NI LabVIEW Software Platform shall be evaluated within HGF. Evaluation results and experience shall be reported here.

A list of some technologies that LabVIEW/NI provides and some open source alternatives proposed by Helmholtz Centers is presented in the following sections.

Responsibility, Authority, Support, Inform (RASI)

To get some coherence under all partners, it may help to define the roles for different technologies. Therefore the following tables should be adjusted to find a good match over all parties. At the moment, the following persons are currently representing their centers:

• GSI: Holger Brand, Thomas Bretz
• HZDR: Nicole Wagner, Peter Kaever
• ...

Frontend technologies

SW-Technology	NI	HZDR	GSI
Programming	LabVIEW	Python, C/C++	Python, C/C++, Rust?
SCADA	LabVIEW DSC-Module	EPICS, WinCC, TwinCAT	EPICS or Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana, Prometheus, Prometheus Alerting (not jet tried)
PV-Monitor	DSM	N/A	MQTT-Explorer (DIM Web-DID)
Machine Vision	LabVIEW Vision Module	OpenCV	OpenCV
Data Analysis & Manipulation	build-in	N/A	pandas
Data Viewer	DIAdem	N/A	HDF VIEW
Data Visualisation	build-in	N/A	matplotlib for Python
GUI	LabVIEW	Qt	tkinter/themed-tkinter, DearPyGui, PyQt5, with some templates and Streamlit for webbased GUI
T	NI	HZDR	GSI

Backend technologies

SW-Technology	NI	HZDR	GSI
Multi-threading/-processing	LabVIEW build-in data flow	N/A	Python: Threads/Processing/Asyncio or QT
Actor Framework	NI Actor Framework	N/A	Python: pykka / PyACDAQ with example: VacuumHeatingSystem or Thespian (not tried))
Process Variable Communication	Shared Variable	N/A	MQTT, EPICS Channel Access (DIM, OPC-UA)
Process Variable Engine	Shared Variable Engine	N/A	MQTT Broker
Finite State Machine	LabVIEW State-Diagram-Toolkit, LabVIEW State Chart Module(VIPM)	N/A	python-state-machine
FPGA	LabVIEW FPGA-Module	N/A	VHDL, MUPPET with support for Python, EPICS (and LabVIEW driver)
PID & Fuzzy	LabVIEW PID and Fuzzy Logic	N/A	Python: Simpul
Vision Acquisition	IMAQdx	Cameleon	OpenCV or Vendor specific GigE driver (e.g. Allied Vision Vimba)
Scientific Computing	build-in	N/A	NumPy, SciPy
Data Storage	TDM / TDMS	N/A	HDF5 for Python
Motion	NI Motion	N/A	N/A
T	NI	HZDR	GSI

Hardware oriented

HW-Technology	NI	HZDR	GSI
Small Control Devices	cRIO	Beckhoff, µC, Siemens, SOCS	Arduino, Controllino or Raspberry PI with DAQ-Hats Example , Beckhoff (TwinCat Soft-SPS or HW-SPS)
Test- and Measurement Platforms	PXI	µTCA	N/A
DAQ-Hardware	DAQmx	own board development	Multi I/O USB Module Examples or MCC DAQ,
FPGA	cRIO, PXI/USB-RIO	N/A	own development, e.g. MUPPET
T	NI	HZDR	GSI