Machine studies and LSA: efficient exploitation of the CERN accelerators' control infrastructure

Over the last years significant effort has been put into homogenisation of the control systems of the different CERN accelerators. In addition to the intended operational benefits, this approach has had an important impact on machine development studies, leading to a considerable increase in efficiency, but also opening up completely new prospects. In this talk the approach of using MATLAB and Python based scripting tools to control and monitor the accelerator environment during machine studies is presented. Therewith, fast programming is combined with the ability of efficiently storing and post-processing measurement data. A collection of real-world examples will be discussed as well.