An Equipment Hub for Managing a Small Town and a Complex Machine

Effective maintenance of the accelerators’ complex is vital for CERN’s mission. While this work is highly dependent on operational planning and constraints, it also needs to be coordinated with the maintenance of the infrastructure where the complex is embedded. The nature and degree of the logistics problems that arise from this interdependence cannot be handled by partial, decoupled solutions from each of the stakeholders. CERN’s Enterprise Asset Management system is the central hub where all relevant data about equipment and its maintenance is kept. It is also where data and documents about the manufacturing, installation, safety inspection, radiation measurements, disposal, etc. of the scientific equipment reside. This hub allows the effective sharing of consistent equipment data, accessed by a large number of people and systems, and supplies a wide range of interfaces – ranging from the user in the field with no access to a desktop computer, to scheduling systems that need to interact with it through Web services; this is achieved by means of a series of systems, tools and mechanisms, all dedicated to different needs but working on the same data and sharing common policies.