Information Management within the LHC Hardware Commissioning Project

The core task of the commissioning of the LHC technical systems was the individual test of the 1572 superconducting circuits of the collider, the powering tests. The two objectives of these tests were the validation of the different sub-systems making each superconducting circuit as well as the validation of the superconducting elements of the circuits in their final configuration in the tunnel. A wide set of software applications were developed by the team in charge of coordinating the powering activities (Hardware Commissioning Coordination) in order to manage the amount of information required for the preparation, execution and traceability of the tests. In all the cases special care was taken in order to keep the tools consistent with the LHC quality assurance policy, avoid redundancies between applications, ensure integrity and coherence of the test results and optimise their usability within an accelerator operation environment. This paper describes the main characteristics of these tools; it details their positive impact on the completion on time of the LHC Hardware Commissioning Project and presents usage being envisaged during the coming years of operation of the LHC

State Machine Framework And Its Use For Driving LHC Operational states

The LHC follows a complex operational cycle with 12 major phases that include equipment tests, preparation, beam injection, ramping and squeezing, finally followed by the physics phase. This cycle is modelled and enforced with a state machine, whereby each operational phase is represented by a state. On each transition, before entering the next state, a series of conditions is verified to make sure the LHC is ready to move on. The State Machine framework was developed to cater for building independent or embedded state machines. They safely drive between the states executing tasks bound to transitions and broadcast related information to interested parties. The framework encourages users to program their own actions. Simple configuration management allows the operators to define and maintain complex models themselves. An emphasis was also put on easy interaction with the remote state machine instances through standard communication protocols. On top of its core functionality, the framework offers a transparent integration with other crucial tools used to operate LHC, such as the LHC Sequencer. LHC Operational States has been in production for a year and was seamlessly adopted by the operators. Further extensions to the framework and its application in operations are under way