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22 DECEMBER,2021 | By Bastien Rae, Giulia Romagnoli, Silvia Schuh-Erhard, Pascal and the NA-CONS team

AFT (Automatic Fault Tracking) for Experimental Areas

The AFT is a web application created by BE-CSS group that allow each injector or facilities to register fault that happened in the machines and to documents which device or service cause the fault and to display for each machine the statistic of availability on a chosen timeslot. You can as well change the status of certain fault e.g non-blocking, blocking, understood, … Every week the AFT working group meets with the machine and now also experimental area representants to review the different fault with the equipment expert.

From this year, the North and East Area has been implemented with thanks to the collaboration of CSS, NA-CONS and our group. The challenge was to adapt the application to the needs of our beam lines and respective operation (not circulating machines, parallel beamlines, access to user areas, etc.). We decided to use the corresponding beam destination to be able to have specific statistic to for each beam line. Thanks to that we are now able to see which system is more critical for the experimental area availability and to have better report at FOM (Forum of Machine) held weekly and allowing us to keep track of failure causes and mitigation measures.

In the figure below you can see the globally good availability for the North Area this year, however without the SPS availability considered.

CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT BE-EA 2021

During the past few years, the BE-EA group has been “evolving” the beamline and experimental area lifecycle documenteation by implementing a coherent configuration management (CM) strategy to all experimental areas following the example of other CERN accelerators. Configuration management is an engineering process in which the final goal is providing a clear and coherent picture of the status of a beam line at a given moment in time.

Configuration management is based on different tools:

  • Hardware Baseline: Product Breakdown Structures in EDMS are available for all experimental areas
  • Layout Database: the sequence of functional positions for every beamlines is registered with time dependency (link with all other databases at CERN, with Integration and Installation Drawings, with 3D models, with assets, …). Starting from the Layout database, an automatic generation of the sequence file to be imported in MADX for beam optics calculations is possible.
  • Naming: all EA equipment codes are registered on the Accelerator Naming Portal.
  • Infor and EAM Light: ASSET Management is done for all beamline equipment.

The configuration management strategy is however only effective if a coherent CHANGE MANAGEMENT STRATEGY is also applied. To allow for this major changes in Experimental Areas beamlines are now comunicated trought ECRs and following a clear evaluation and approval process.

What is new?

  • A new online table is available in our group website with all documents listed, in circulation and recently approved.
  • 120 panoramic pictures are available of the NEW EAST AREA BEAMLINES (primary, mixed, T8a, T8b, T9-T10, CHARM and IRRAD). GIS Portal – Machine (cern.ch)
  • All East Area beamlines, K12 and H2 beamline of North Area are inserted in layout Database and the automatic generation of the sequence file is available for these lines.
  • The codes and items of the beamline equipment of our group are registered on EDMS. Every equipment has finally a responsible in the document: BE-EA Equipment Responsibility EDMS 2442877
  • Update and control of the the Hardware baseline of the HiRadMat Project has started togheter with the Layout Database structure and the equipment codes and names.

BE-EA Website and future possibilities

After joining BE department we needed to renew the group website in line with the global BE template. Drupal has been chose by the department due to its flexible and easy usage. All section, beam line, services, and support of the group have been added and many more are still to come ! Projects will be added during the YETS and any comments or suggestions from all BE EA members will allow our website to grow and be more efficient. At the same time we have maintained the traditional SBA pages, known and used by many of our user and experiment teams. Merging the two platforms will allow us for more flexibility and new functionalities to be implemented, starting with the user request forms, DESY table reservation and more to come.

Present/Future Drupal Possibilities

  • Access restriction by person / e-group for read/write.
  • Infinity module for a lot of features.
  • Reservation of material
  • Webform / contact form
  • Media display
  • News thread
  • Possibility of writing is own module (expert and time required)
  • ….
  • Any comments, questions, ideas are welcome and make it progress.