CERN Safety Alarm System Supervisory Board

Minutes of the meeting no 10 held on 02.02.2004
Subjects:
Author: Uwe Epting
Participants: Roberto BARTOLOME (TS), Alain CHOUVELON (SC), Paolo CIRIANI (TS), Antonio CUENCA (SC), Uwe EPTING (TS, Secretary), Andre FAUGIER (AC), Silvia GRAU (TS), Pierre NININ (TS), Rui NUNES (TS), Thomas PETTERSSON (TS), Keith POTTER (TS Board member), Luigi SCIBILE (TS), Fritz SZONCSO (SC), Vincent VUILLEMIN (PH Board member), Wolfgang WEINGARTEN (SC, Chairman)
Distribution: Participants, Lyn EVANS (DG), Philippe LEBRUN (AT), Steve MYERS (SL), Paul PROUDLOCK (LHC), Wolfgang von RUEDEN (IT), Dieter SCHLATTER (PH)

1 Comments on the minutes of the 9th meeting

The minutes have been approved without changes.

2 Feedback on safety zones

Alain Chouvelon presented the review of the safety zones at CERN. Input on the subject was given by all concerned people (alarm generation, distribution, fire brigade, etc.). After presenting the history and current status of the alarm system, a possibility for the future safety zones grouping was shown. After calculations of how much money could be saved on hardware and how much has to be spent for CSAM modifications, it seems that it will be cheaper to keep the current zoning.

The globe of innovation will have its own safety zone and not be included in one of the existing safety zones. This new zone will be added to the CSAM project.

The cleaning of existing alarms is underway but is a difficult and long task. The difficulty is to find the responsibles of the alarms and to re-define, group or suppress them. The CSAM installation shows that some of alarms that are stored in the database do not exist in reality and some of the alarm descriptions (display text) are not up-to-date. The installation work is a unique opportunity to update the data. As CSAM gives the exact location of the detector, this information is much more crucial and the data quality (e.g. exact naming) becomes much more important.

For the future special attention should be given to not over-install fire alarms in normal office buildings. Alain Chouvelon is the linkman between SC and TS.

3 Demonstration of CSAM in the TCR

Roberto Bartolome presented the current installation status. The installation contains the redundant servers in the SCR and TCR and the equipment in the pilot zone SM18. The installation uses already redundant networking. The fire brigade followed already some training sessions. For this pilot installation CSAM and the TDS based alarm system will run in parallel for two months to validate the CSAM system. After the validation of the pilot zone, all TDS alarms will be connected to CSAM. Only CSAM will then be used by the SCR. Further installations will be done in parallel and connected to CSAM only after the installation has been checked locally. The fire brigade will use only one system at a time and not two in parallel.

TCR visit: Relay Room and test equipment TCR: CSAM and old system comparison, alarm generation in SM18

4 Any Other Business

Technical alarms, that are not safety alarms (AL3), are not included in the CSAM systems (e.g. aggression alarms). These alarms must be transmitted to the fire brigade by another system. This has to be discussed in another meeting.

The question was raised if the grouping of the control rooms into a single control room causes any problems. As CSAM is based on Ethernet networks it should not cause any particular problem.

W. Weingarten recalled the mandate of the steering committee. It is the proper and full implementation of the recommendations for the LHC safety alarm system, as defined in the memo of L. Evans (1998). He reminded that there should be a unique responsible service for the entire safety alarm system of the LHC machine and experiments. In the meeting no. 5 (2001) it was decided that the leader of the group that is executing the work is responsible for the correct implementation and handling of the safety alarms. We need somebody who has the complete overview and can analyse the influences of the different service suppliers to the alarm system (e.g. electricity, networking, cooling, etc.). The role of Mr. Alarm inside the Safety Commission is to ensure the compliance with the safety rules (including Quality Assurance).

Next meeting: 12th July 2004, 14:30

Proposed agenda:

created at Wed Feb 4 16:30:45 MET 2004 with the TS/CSE/CO - Minutes Maker