Towards a Common Reliability & Availability Information System for Particle Accelerator Facilities

Failure event and maintenance record based data collection systems have a long tradition in industry. Today, the particle accelerator community does not possess a common platform that permits storing and sharing reliability and availability information in an efficient way. In large accelerator facilities used for fundamental physics research, each machine is unique, the scientific culture, work organization, and management structures are often incompatible with a streamlined industrial approach. Other accelerator facilities enter the area of industrial process improvement, like medical accelerators due to legal requirements and constraints. The Heidelberg Ion Beam Therapy Center is building up a system for reliability and availability analysis, exploring the technical and organizational requirements for a community-wide information system on accelerator system and component reliability and availability. This initiative is part of the EU H₂020 project ARIES, started in May 2017. We will present the technical scope of the system that is supposed to access and obtain information specific to reliability statistics in ways not compromising the information suppliers and system producers.