Call for paper

• The deadline of abstract submission is 31, July,2016
• Abstracts must be submitted online. Please follow the rules and guidelines before submitting your abstract.
• Abstract will be as posts, and the Organizing Committee will select some abstracts as oral presentation.
• Please click here(require login) to submit abstract.

WAO2016 Session Topics

Here are the current Session Chair assignments and the updated session abstracts from the IPC:  

1) HWDB - How We Do Business(Possibly 2 sessions)    Glen Johns

        This session is an opportunity to share details about your facility with the broader accelerator operations community. We want to hear from you if your lab is new to WAO, has transitioned to a new program, or has undergone a major upgrade or added a new facility. Tell us about your mission, how you are organized, your staffing requirements and shift rotations, typical experience level of operators, training programs, day-to-day challenges encountered, and any other operations topics you would like to share. 

2) New Control Room Issues and Technologies   Gregory Marr

        Unless you’re starting from scratch, improving the Control Room tends to be a constant effort, as upgrades are made piece by piece. Hardware, software, environment -- how much is really new?  How hard is it to advance to new technologies when the old still works well? Are your installations on the cutting edge, or versions behind the latest? There are many new technologies available that could be adapted to the Control Room.  Ergonomics and interactive displays are just a few of the developments.  What else is available? We would like to see examples of what you have found and how it is being used in control rooms. Think about relating your experiences in one or more of the following ways:

         Compare and contrast the old and new technologies in your Control Room. Highlight what works well and/or has stood the test of time.

  Relate your success or failure to replace old Control Room systems with new technologies. Was there resistance to change? Was resistance ultimately founded or unfounded? 

  Describe a tried and true favorite which has stood the test of time.

  Showcase your latest and greatest Control Room improvements.

3) Performance Statistics Michael Bieler

  Most accelerator facilities publish performance statistics, i.e. numbers like ‘Beam Availability’ or ‘Mean Ttime Between Failure’.  In many facilities operations managers are producing these numbers, but the way the numbers are generated varies widely.

          In this session speakers should not only present the statistics of their machine, but should also explain how these numbers are generated. Is the statistic ‘handmade’ by the operations manager, or is it automatically generated from the logbook or the beam current archive? What incidents are counted as a fault? Are only total beam losses counted as a fault, or are partial beam losses or a degradation of beam quality also counted as a fault? Can large, single events be taken out of the statistics (if for example the users have been rescheduled)?Finally it would be useful to know how the performance metric was defined. What was the influence of users or the funding agencies?

4) Operator Tools (By operators for operators)  Kazuro Furukawa

  The possibilities of running and diagnosing machines/systems from home, a mobile devices, etc., are all possibilities.  What new tools have operators developed?   Are they available and how are they being used?

5) Operator Issues – Building an operations group from scratch    Petra Schuett

  Sometimes, the operations group for an accelerator has to be built from scratch. Certainly, this needs to be done, when a completely new accelerator has been built. But also, after a long shutdown, it may happen, that you have to rebuild the operations group, since many of them moved on to other jobs. 

  If you run a “stand alone” machine, e.g. for medical purposes, the tasks of the operations group will differ from the situation in a research laboratory. In both cases, the commissioning is usually covered by the crew, who built the accelerator. But when you come to the daily routine operation, other skills and expertise are needed. 

Did you experience one of these situations? Will you face it in the near future and would like to discuss it during the workshop? Or do you have good advice for those, who will face it? In any case – tell us about your special scenario:

  How did you (will you) go about hiring and training operators to run the machine? How many do you need? Which expertise needs to be covered? What is the best mix of skills? What other criteria do you have, when you hire operators? How do you organize the training? 

6) Poster Session – Brief Introduction Eiichi Takada

We will be trying something new.  We would like to give each poster presenter a couple of minutes to “advertise” their poster.  A brief introduction to each poster would be done during this session.  The duration of this session will be shortened to one hour to allow early departure for the dinner.

7) Poster Session             Eiichi Takada

This session will be used as a method of soliciting input from laboratories that may not want or have a chance to give a presentation.  There was some discussion of giving presenters a few minutes to talk about their posters prior to presenting them.

8) Operator Projects         Brian  Freeman

  What do your Operators work on while not operating? At some labs operating an accelerator is a not a year round job. Many operators work on projects that could benefit operations in many ways. So what kinds of things do they work on? Machine maintenance?  Diagnostics, or installing control room or machine hardware?  Do they write software or develop procedures?  Update training and documentation?  There are many systems and aspects of an accelerator that can fall into this category.  This session is a chance to bring some of them to light and give operators a chance to bring their involvement to the surface.

9) Machine Commission and Re-Commissioning Violeta Toma

  A commissioning process may be applied to:

  new projects

  existing systems that were subjected to expansion, revamping or up-grading

  existing systems that were not in use for a long time

  The purpose is to verify that the machine functions according to its specifications and to hand it over, effectively and orderly, from the constructor/installer to the owner.

This session is dedicated to hardware commissioning. We would like to learn how commissioning is done at your lab: do you segregate hardware commissioning from beam commissioning or run them in parallel? To what extent are your operators involved in machine commissioning or re-commissioning: what role do they play and at what stage do they become part of the process.

10) Beam Commissioning          Rossano Giachino

  Beam commissioning is an essential phase to reach design performance of newborn machines and of operating machines that underwent maintenance or upgrade periods. The operational experience accumulated in this phase by young as well as experienced operators is often crucial for a successful follow up of accelerator operation. In this session, we try to put together the experience accumulated by various operation teams in developing tasks, optimizing software applications and coordinating parallel activities during the beam commissioning phases. The session will profit in particular from proved experience of teams that carried out commissioning of operating facilities.

11) Open Session - Panel

  A panel of IPC member will lead an open discussion under the direction of the session chair.  They will have about 10 topics and questions.  They will initiate and facilitate dialog on those questions.  The chairman may put up slides for the panel and encourage discussion.  For instance maintenance and the frequency and importance could be one of the discussion questions.

12) Open Discussion – Small Questions

  This is chance to ask “small questions” that aren’t normally covered as part of the workshop.  You will have access to all the other laboratories experience.

13) Operator and Machine Physicist Interaction Montse Pont

This session is aimed at stimulating a good interaction between machine operation and physics shift crews. During machine physics studies, operation teams are often heavily involved in the preparation of the accelerator development program, covering studies well beyond the standard operation tasks. What is the operator responsibility when working with a machine physicist? How should we interact with the machine physicist in order to gain knowledge and expertise? We would like to hear from your experience and try to increase motivation and the knowledge transfer between machine physicists and operation teams.

14) Operation of Compact Accelerators

  Much of the workshop is dominated with the larger accelerators, but there is much to learn from the smaller accelerators.  What are some of the unique operations problems with these accelerators?   What makes them harder to operate in some cases?

15) Dramatic Incidents and Lessons Learned   Daniel Johnson

  Many labs experience common failures and maybe they wouldn’t if we could share some of our experiences.  The analysis of some incidents and lessons learned might provide a wakeup call to other labs.  For instance, floods at Fermilab a few years ago caused the lab to shut down, but operators still reported for work.  Do other labs have flooding issues or a backup plan?  Are you prepared for these types of near misses?