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. THE COMMISSIONING OF THE LHC SUPERCONDUCTING CIRCUITS Each one of the 1572 superconducting circuits forming the LHC collider has to be carefully commissioned before injecting beam into the accelerator. The circuits have been classified into nine groups (circuit types) depending on their maximum current and the associated protection system. Detailed commissioning procedures have been prepared by the system experts and the Hardware Commissioning Coordination (HCC) team for each circuit type. Each procedure consists on a sequence of tests to be carried out at different current levels. A circuit is never powered to a higher current unless all the tests at the previous current are successfully completed. These tests are usually called steps and the sequence of steps that a circuit has to complete during its commissioning are the profiles. A step consists on the following actions, which have to be performed in the indicated order: Verify that the previous step is properly completed Get the information related to the step and the circuit being tested from the commissioning databases Launch the execution of the tests, normally consisting on the restart of the power converter, ramp up of the circuit to the test current and performance of an action at the current plateau (simulated failure, quench, electrical measurements, energy extraction, etc.) Collection and analysis of the test result data. This is done during or after the tests (online/offline) depending on the test type Approval or rejection of the test results by the system experts involved on the tests, helped by software tools Store the test result in the MTF database (see below) The operator does some of these actions manually, however, special effort has been put on automating as much as possible the whole sequence so most of the actions do not require human intervention. A set of software tools have been developed in order to assist the hardware commissioning team and the control room crew when performing these tests, and to prevent them from doing mistakes like powering circuits to a current level for which the circuit has not been validated, or powering circuits that should not be powered due to non-conformities. Special care has been taken on keeping the tools consistent with the LHC quality assurance policy, avoid redundancies between expert work and applications, ensure the integrity and coherence of the tests results and optimise their usage during the very intense days of the LHC commissioning. The developed tools can be divided in two types: The Sequencer: operation tool used by the operator for performing automatically the test sequences The information management tools This paper describes the information management tools. INFORMATION MANAGEMENT TOOLS The different applications and databases used during the hardware commissioning to manage the large amount of information are presented below.