Accelerator fault tracking at CERN

CERN’s Accelerator Fault Tracking (AFT) system aims to facilitate answering questions like: “Why are we not doing physics when we should be?” and “What can we do to increase machine availability?” People have tracked faults for many years, using numerous, diverse, distributed and un-related systems. As a result, and despite a lot of effort, it has been difficult to get a clear and consistent overview of what is going on, where the problems are, how long they last for, and what is the impact. This is particularly true for the LHC, where faults may induce long recovery times after being fixed. The AFT project was launched in February 2014 as a collaboration between the Controls and Operations groups with stakeholders from the LHC Availability Working Group (AWG). The AFT system has been used successfully in operation for LHC since 2015, yielding a lot of interest and generating a growing user community. In 2017 the scope has been extended to cover the entire Injector Complex. This paper will describe the AFT system and the way it is used in terms of architecture, features, user communities, workflows and added value for the organisation.