ELI-ALPS, Szeged, Hungary
ELI-ALPS will be the first large-scale attosecond facility accessible to the international scientific community and its user groups. The facility-wide Personnel Safety System (PSS) has been successfully developed and commissioned for the majority of the laboratories. The system has three major goals. First, it provides safe and automatic sensing and interlocking engineering measures as well as monitoring and controlling interfaces for all laboratories in Building A: emergency stop buttons, interlock and enabling signals, door and roller blind sensors, and entrance control. Second, it integrates and monitors the research technology equipment delivered by external parties as black-box systems (all laser systems, and some others). Third, it includes the PSS subsystems of research technology equipment developed on site by in-house and external experts (some of the secondary sources). The gradual development of the system is based on the relevant standards and best practices of functional safety as well as on an iterative and systematic lifecycle incorporating several internal and external reviews. The system is implemented with an easily maintainable network of safety PLCs.
ELI-ALPS, Szeged, Hungary
ELI-ALPS will be the first large-scale attosecond facility accessible to the international scientific community and its user groups. Control system development has three major directions: vacuum control systems, optical control systems, as well as the integrated control, monitoring and data acquisition systems. The development of the systems has asked for different levels of integration. In certain cases low-level devices are integrated (e.g. vacuum valves), while in other cases complete systems are integrated (e.g. the Tango interface of a laser system). This heterogeneous environment is managed through the elaboration of a common and general architecture. Most of the hardware elements are connected to PLCs (direct control level), which are responsible for the low-level operation of devices, including machine protection functions, and data transfer to the supervisory control level (CLIs, GUIs). Certain hardware elements are connected to the supervisory layer (cameras), as well as the Tango interface of the laser systems. This layer handles also data acquisition with a special focus on the metadata catalogue.
ELI-ALPS, Szeged, Hungary
ELI-ALPS will be the first large-scale attosecond facility accessible to the international scientific community and its user groups. The core business of ELI-ALPS is to generate attosecond pulses and provide these to the prospective users. In order to reach this ultimate goal, one key support area, the engineering development of complex systems as well as the engineering custom design service, has been systematically elaborated based on the standards, recent results, trends and best practices of systems engineering. It covers the boundaries towards all related support areas, from building operation and maintenance, to the custom manufacturing provided by the workshops, with the intention to make the model as well as the daily work as comprehensive and consistent as possible. Different tools have been evaluated and applied through the years, however, a key lessons learned is that some of the most important tools are teamwork, personal communication and constructive conflicts.