Coordination of the commissioning of the LHC technical systems

The Large Hadron Collider operation relies on 1232 superconducting dipoles with a field of 8.33T and 400 superconducting quadrupoles with a strength of 220 T/m powered at 12kA, operating in superfluid He at 1.9K. For dipoles and quadrupoles as well as for many other magnets more than 1700 power converters are necessary to feed the superconducting circuits. A sophisticated magnet protection system is crucial to detect a quench and safely extract the energy stored in the circuits (about 1GJ only in one of the dipole circuits) after a resistive transition. Besides, in such complex architecture, many technical services (e.g. cooling and ventilation, technical network, electrical distribution, GSM network, controls system, etc.) have to be reliably available during commissioning. Consequently, the commissioning of the technical systems and the associated infrastructures has been carefully studied. Procedures, automatic control and analysis tools, repositories for test data, management structures for carrying out and following up the tests have been put in place. This paper briefly describes the management structure and tool created to ensure safe, smooth and rapid commissioning.