ANL, Argonne, Illinois, USA
The purpose of the Advanced Photon Source Upgrade (APS-U) project is to update the facility to take advantage of the multi-bend achromat (MBA) magnet lattices, which will result in narrowly focused x-ray beams of much higher brightness. The APS-U installation has a short schedule of one-year. In order to plan and execute a task of such complexity, a collaboration between many individuals of very diverse backgrounds must exist. The Component Database (CDB) has been created to aid in documenting and managing all the parts that will go into the upgraded facility. After initial deployment and use, it became clear that the system must become more flexible, as the engineers started requesting new features such as tracking inventory assemblies, supporting relationships between components, and several usability requests. Recently, a more generic database schema has been implemented. This allows for the addition of more functionality without needing to refactor the database. The topics discussed in this paper include advantages and challenges of a more generic schema, new functionality, and plans for future work.
