CERN Safety Alarm System Supervisory Board

Minutes of the meeting no. 1 held on 10.12.1999
Subjects:
Author: Uwe EPTING
Participants: Paolo CIRIANI (ST), Uwe EPTING (ST) (Secretary), Silvia GRAU (ST), Harry LAEGER (ST), Pierre NININ (ST), Keith POTTER (EST), Dietrich SCHINZEL (EP), Helmut SCHONBACHER (TIS) (Chairman), Luigi SCIBILE (ST), Wolfgang WEINGARTEN (TIS)
Distribution: Participants, Manuel DELFINO (IT), Paul FAUGERAS (AC), Giorgio GOGGI (EP), Dietrich GUSEWELL (EST), Kurt HUBNER (DG), Philippe LEBRUN (LHC), Jurgen MAY (DG), Stephen MYERS (SL), Rui NUNES (ST), Alberto SCARAMELLI (ST), Carlos SOLER (ST)

Introduction

In 1997 a working group for the safety alarms was established upon the request of the LHC Project Leader Lynn Evans. This working group provided its recommendations, which were endorsed by the CERN Management in autumn 1998. They included the proposal to set up a Supervisory Board. The TIS Division Leader was designated as chairman with K. Potter and D. Schinzel as members.

Today, this supervisory board held its first meeting to obtain the information on the ongoing project. The project, formerly known as Alarm Level 3 - AL3, was renamed to CERN Safety Alarm Monitoring - CSAM. The reason is that all safety related alarms have to be covered by the project, i.e. also alarms of level 2. The project has the aim to provide a unique and standard system for CERN and the LHC.

The recommendations and all other project related documents are available at the CSAM project web page (http://st-div.web.cern.ch/st-div/mo/CSAM/CSAM.htm).

The agenda of the meeting:

  1. Presentation of the project
  2. Responsibilities to collect information
  3. Impact from other working groups
  4. Implementation of recommendations (technical choices)
  5. Summary and future meetings

CSAM Presentation

P. Ninin presented the CSAM project. Details can be found on the above-cited Web page. The project is a ST divisional project, which means it covers several ST groups and interferes also with other divisions.

In addition to the presentation the following points were discussed:

Number of alarms

The members of the supervisory board were surprised about the number of actually monitored safety alarms (17000 !). ST/AA or ST/MO can provide details about the alarms, such as number per building, etc…

Organisation and Information

Different meetings and working groups exist to discuss the same subject. The CSAM project team tries to collaborate with all parties, but this is not always easy. A closer collaboration between TIS, ST and the equipment groups is foreseen. At least one representant of each group should be invited to the different meetings. The CSAM team has already Rui Nunes as linkman to the experiments and participates in the CMS and ATLAS safety meetings. The GLIMOSes of the experiments participate in the TIS safety co-ordination meeting. A similar type of meeting has to be organised for the machine.

The actual CSAM project organisation was clarified during the discussion:

Technical Aspects

The traceability and routing of safety alarms will be very important for the reporting to INB. It is foreseen to keep all information in a database (Cablotheque).

The alarm transmission has to be diversely redundant. The proposal of the SL/CO network structure was presented. It provides a redundancy in the cabling and one redundancy in the case of broken cables by rerouting via another path. The networking service will probably not be provided by ST/MO but SL/CO, who is doing this already today.

The system configuration will be kept in a reference database. This allows updating both systems at the same time and guarantees coherent systems during upgrading periods.

In the fire station a "safety tailored" SCADA (=Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) system will provide the necessary information for the firebrigade. The CERN SCADA working group is actually looking at different SCADA systems. The output of this working group will be considered and it will be verified if the CSAM requirements are covered by the proposed SCADA systems. Nevertheless we have to look at a complete "safety system solution", which might not be covered by a general CERN SCADA system.

CERN recommendations exist for PLCs. The CSAM project follows these recommendations.

The detection equipment itself is not part of the project. A clear interface definition document will be provided to ensure a proper integration of all equipment. The type, number and places of equipment have to be decided by the GLIMOSes and TIS. A verification of the actual number of safety zones should be done in order to reduce the zones and costs.

Summary

The members of the supervisory board are satisfied with the presented project and the proposed solution and think that the CSAM project is on the right way. More co-ordination and specification meetings are foreseen to include all people concerned, mainly to bring together TIS, ST and the GLIMOSes.

As the project covers not only LHC specific safety alarms, it was decided to change the name of the supervisory board to Safety Alarm System Supervisory Board instead of "LHC Safety Alarm System Supervisory Board"

Next meeting

It was decided that at the next meeting the GLIMOS of the four LHC experiments will be invited to present a status report on the planning of safety alarms in their experiments.

created at Tue Aug 29 13:47:52 METDST 2000 with the ST/MO/IN - Minutes Maker