Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
The Z Machine is the world's largest pulsed power machine, routinely delivering over 20 MA of electrical current to targets in support of US nuclear stockpile stewardship and in pursuit of inertial confinement fusion. The large-scale, multi-disciplinary nature of experiments ('shots') on the Z Machine requires resources and expertise from disparate organizations with independent functions and management, forming a Collaborative System-of-Systems. This structure, combined with the Emergent Knowledge Processes central to preparation and execution, creates significant challenges in planning and coordinating required activities leading up to a given experiment. The present work demonstrates an approach to scheduling planned activities on shot day to aid in coordinating workers among these different groups, using minimal information about activities' temporal relationships to form a Simple Temporal Network (STN). Historical data is mined, allowing a standard STN to be created for common activities, with the lower bounds between those activities defined. Activities are then scheduled at their earliest possible times to provide participants a time to check-in when interested.
maschaf@sandia.gov
