WAO2014

How We Do Business?

This session is an opportunity for facilities new to WAO (or established facilities, if newly restructured) to share their business model for operations. How is your lab organized from a daily operational standpoint? Do you have a unique structure that lends itself to providing a meaningful end user experience? How does operations interface with the conventional facilities? How many operators and what is the best shift rotation? What challenges does operations at your facility face? These are just a few of many critical questions about how we do business. Most importantly, what concrete lessons, experiences and examples can workshop attendees take back to their facilities to implement?

There are many new technologies available that could be adapted to the Control Room. Some of them might be new computer screens/monitors, video walls, fixed displays, touch screens, other input devices, etc. We would like to see examples of what is available and how it is being used in control rooms.

How is machine reliability and availability impacted by the user’s requirements? Sometimes the users are happy with any beam as opposed to waiting for “quality” beam. They don’t want the high intensity, high luminosity, brightness, stable spill structure or any of the other parameters used to describe user’s beam quality. What kind of beam quality do they need? What are important parameters to them? What impact does ‘customer satisfaction’ have on typical machine statistics? The availability of a machine is usually considered the % of time that all system will be available to produce physic beams. These systems will have to be reliable to maximize the availability of the beam time. Various topics like Beam Quality metrics, performance statistics or repair tracking will be presented to explain how they will contribute to increase the overall availability.

The operation of a superconducting machine and components is unique. It requires special attention and procedures. A simple mistake can cause extended downtime. What kind of additional stress does it put on operations and how do labs deal with it?

Remote operation is different than is was a few years ago. We are not running machines from foreign countries. The possibilities of running and diagnosing machines/systems from home, a mobile devices, etc., are an issue. What new tools are available and how are they being used?

The new software used to operate the machines are becoming automated programs or operational sequences. These new procedures are very well integrated into the new operator generation. In the meantime there is a demand to understand more the physics behind the actual process being automated. We should strive to find a good balance between efficiency and loss of operator knowledge. Automated procedures, sequencers, sophisticated programs or simply situations where these issues have been encountered will be analyzed and presented.

Online lectures and other new ways to provide information on machine specifics and accelerator physics. A good example would be an online training lecture on synchrotron radiation. We would like to examine what is available and how labs are taking advantage of this resource.

How do you run and operations group? How do you keep operators motivated and happy ultimately keeping them in the group. The operator job is changing fast. The diversification of machines and systems require different skills to operate and troubleshoot them. The physics schedules and new budgets problems are redefining the job of an operator. How do we motivate these operators, maintain their knowledge, and keep their interest on accelerators? Responsibility, team building, part time jobs on other systems (possibly only during shutdowns), are a small sample of items which may be part of the recipe.

How do you communicate within your group? How do you reach the people not scheduled for shift? What tools are available for managing operators?

How do you communicate within your group? How do you reach the people not scheduled for shift? What tools are available for managing operators?

Intuitive human-machine interaction requires the computer to recognize the context and intention of the respective user.
In everyday face-to-face encounters, humans rely heavily on visual information, in order to grasp as much context information regarding their surrounding and dialog partner. With recent advances in computer vision, this perceptual capability can be implemented technically, and the deduced situation awareness can be beneficially used for innovative and intuitive user interfaces.
This presentation gives an overview of the advances at Fraunhofer IOSB for enhanced user interfaces with vision-based perceptual components. The advances are emphasized by recent project use cases, in which prevailing interfaces were upgraded to perceptual interaction modalities for user-friendly and intuitive input solutions.

Posters will be in the room all day. During this time slot, the presenters should be at their posters for discussions.

There are a few radiation safety tasks performed by operators and they vary from laboratory to laboratory. If these tasks aren’t performed properly, people can be injured. We would like to examine ways to assist and control these tasks by providing easy to follow techniques, methods or procedures. Some incidents may be shared to help demonstrate a problem and solution.

The commissioning of a new machine or re-commissioning a machine after a long shut down is a delicate and important moment not to be missed. This technique is now widely used to make sure all systems are operational before injecting beam. Small and large facilities will go through this procedure and will illustrate how different approaches are used to achieve this goal.

The commissioning of a new machine or re-commissioning a machine after a long shut down is a delicate and important moment not to be missed. This technique is now widely used to make sure all systems are operational before injecting beam. Small and large facilities will go through this procedure and will illustrate how different approaches are used to achieve this goal.

Toour to Heidelberg Ion Therapy Center and Banquet

Many labs experience common failures and maybe they wouldn’t if we could share some of our experiences. The analysis of some incidents and lessons learned might provide a wakeup call to other labs. For instance, Fermilab and TJNAF damaged magnets in similar incidents.