ATLAS Technical Coordination Expert System

Abstract

When planning an intervention on a complex experiment like ATLAS, the detailed knowledge of the system under intervention and of the interconnection with all the other systems is mandatory. In order to improve the understanding of the parties involved in an intervention, a rule-based expert system has been developed. On the one hand this helps to recognise dependencies that are not always evident and on the other hand it facilitates communication between experts with different backgrounds by translating between vocabularies of specific domains. To simulate an event this tool combines information from different areas such as detector control (DCS) and safety (DSS) systems, gas, cooling, ventilation, and electricity distribution. The inference engine provides a list of the systems impacted by an intervention even if they are connected at a very low level and belong to different domains. It also predicts the probability of failure for each of the components affected by an intervention. Risk assessment models considered are fault tree analysis and principal component analysis. The user interface is a web-based application that uses graphics and text to provide different views of the detector system adapted to the different user needs and to interpret the data