ORNL, Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Cosylab, Ljubljana
Controls groups at large accelerators are routinely called upon to build and support controls for virtually all machine systems. While construction projects within the US DOE system are normally carefully planned and tracked by project management professionals, this support ends when construction milestones are met. However, once construction is complete, work continues as the group performs ongoing support and maintenance while also implementing requested system improvements and upgrades. With customers from virtually every accelerator and experiment group, the demands on the group often exceed the capacity of available resources. This type of diverse workload needs to be well organized and managed in order set proper priorities and ensure efficient use of resources. At SNS, we have collaborated with Cosylab to develop Controls Request Tracker (CRT), which is adapted from the Cosylab Project Manager (CPM) software. The resulting system not only provides standard request tracking features, but is interfaced to the SNS Logbook and work control system. This paper will discuss CRT and how we use it to manage the work of our controls group.
ORNL, Oak Ridge, Tennessee
An effective alarm system consists of a mechanism to monitor control points and generate alarm notifications, tools for operators to view, hear, acknowledge and handle alarms and a good configuration. Despite the availability of numerous fully featured tools, accelerator alarm systems continue to be disappointing to operations, frequently to the point of alarms being permanently silenced or totally ignored. This is often due to configurations that produce an excessive number of alarms or fail to communicate the required operator response. Most accelerator controls systems do a good job of monitoring specified points and generating notifications when parameters exceed predefined limits. In some cases, improved tools can help, but more often, poor configuration is the root cause of ineffective alarm systems. A SNS, we have invested considerable effort in generating appropriate configurations using a rigorous set of rules based on best practices in the industrial process controls community. This paper will discuss our alarm configuration philosophy and operator response to our new system.
