Real-Time System Supervision for the LHC Beam Loss Monitoring System at CERN

The strategy for machine protection and quench prevention of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) is mainly based on the Beam Loss Monitoring (BLM) system. The LHC BLM system is one of the most complex and large instrumentation systems deployed in the LHC. In addition to protecting the collider, the system also needs to provide a means of diagnosing machine faults and deliver feedback of the losses to the control room as well as to several systems for their setup and analysis. In order to augment the dependability of the system several layers of supervision has been implemented internally and externally to the system. This paper describes the different methods employed to achieve the expected availability and system fault detection.