CERN Safety Alarm Monitoring Project

The CERN Safety Alarm Monitoring (CSAM) system is the alarm transmission and supervision system for all CERN premises in the LHC era. Its objective is to help safeguard human life, property and the environment. The CSAM system consists of the acquisition, transmission, supervision and management of alarm-related data using state-of-the-art technology. It also includes some automatic safety actions to reduce hazardous events. As this is a large and multidisciplinary project a strategy based on three main issues was defined. First, the safety standards provide us with a technical framework for dealing systematically with safety-related activities in order to minimize system failures, optimize performance and obtain homogeneity with LHC site installations, maintenance and operation. Second, a rapid prototyping methodology leads to the best technical solutions; and, finally, we consider the commercial aspects required for a tendering procedure.