European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)

Customer:
European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)

Industry:
Energy & Utilities, Government

Deployment country:
Switzerland

Solution:
Business Performance Transformation, Development & Technology Adoption, Smarter Planet

Smarter Planet:
Smarter Energy, Smarter Government

Established in 1954, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is one of the world’s largest particle physics centers. The organization has 20 European member states and is currently the workplace of approximately 2,600 full-time employees, as well as more than 7,900 scientists and engineers representing 580 universities and research facilities. CERN operates a network of six accelerators and one decelerator, with each unit in the chain increasing the energy of the particle beams before delivering them to experiments or to the next more-powerful accelerator.

Business need:
Construction of one of the world’s largest scientific machines provided the impetus for CERN to update the supervisory control and data acquisition (“SCADA”) system at its facility. With no SCADA product on the market that could handle such a complex infrastructure and provide the scalability needed, it sought to tackle the challenges with an in-house solution. A tool for developers to create new templates along with an easy way for the CERN Control Center (CCC) operators to design and present new views of the facility’s inner workings could prove to be the winning combination.

Solution:
CERN implemented a large-scale maintenance solution that provides CCC operators with a method for improving visibility into the site’s technical infrastructure. While a deep layer extracts data from 90,000 units of raw data generated daily at 80,000 monitoring points, CCC operators create and animate views to present users with meaningful status output from the equipment sustaining the site. The solution has enabled the development of 40,000 automated alarms. Augmenting the alarm protocols, the system supports analysis of the measurements collected from the monitoring systems.

Benefits:
Enables actionable views of approximately 2 million units of real data to reach critical monitoring personnel, helping improve safety and productivity Enables trend studies for metrics to aid in the creation of optimized operational parameters Provides deep visibility for control center operators and decision makers into the intricate workings of a complex infrastructure

IBM products and services that were used in this case study.

Software:
IBM ILOG JViews Diagrammer

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