New Tools for Users Management in Experimental Area (ASM-EA

21 DECEMBER, 2022 | By unknown

During the operation of the experimental areas, new users are starting to take data every Wednesday. Each experiment has different constraints and requirements for the beam(s) they desire, as well as needs for different services (movable table(s), vacuum, gas, HV, electronic connections, DAQ, etc..). This requires a lot of coordination between teams and a lot of communication to fulfil the desires of each user in each zone in less than one day. Up to now, the needs of the users were defined via a Word document (the Beam Request) and subsequent various Excel files and/or Word documents that were more and more refined before the user’s installation date by email and phone exchanges – eventually culminating in a Word document (the Work Notice document) published on EDMS that governed what work was carried out in which zone and by whom on every Wednesday during the run. This arduous process was causing at times that information was missed, resulting in more stress on Wednesdays than necessary and the fact that records of previous installations/configurations for each user were not kept in a systematic way. More investment in better and seamless coordination between the users and our EA services in advance of the user installation would mitigate these issues and provide smoother installation.

Since the beginning of 2022, in collaboration with BE-CSS, we have started to develop a tool based on ASM (Accelerator Schedule Management) where the users could fill the different needs that they have for the beam, installation, services. That would also be the place where we will be able to manage, validate, and coordinate these needs in a One-Stop-Shop.

From the beamtime schedule to the installations phase and even afterwards, users, coordinators, physicists, and technicians will be able to see all the requirements that are needed for each time slot and prepare the installation schedule, as well as the schedule for the movable tables and beam instrumentation in this tool. With this tool (ASM-EA) everybody involved will always have access to information for each beam time slots and we will be able to keep track of each configuration (for the beam and for the zone) that was in place for every week and for every user. This tool will start to be used for the 2023 run and we are looking forward to having it in place and gain first experience in real life conditions – oiling and improving the process and tool as we go along. In the future, the work-notification could be automatically generated, a link to the layout DB is foreseen to keep track of each line for any week of the year. And we have many more ideas for useful features to be implemented, after the first, initial use of this tools.