12th Workshop on Accelerator Operations

As the pandemic hit the world we found ourselves in a very different landscape
that nobody was familiar with or prepared for. With the first COVID-19 case in
the country, the way we lived our lives was turned upside down and inside out.
Accelerator operation was no different. Things we took for granted, such as
having at least one operator on site, were no more.
However, with users on the beamlines, the show must go on and the beam needs to
be delivered.
In principle it was not a problem, everything could be done with remote
access to the control room. As we quickly found out an entire new class of
problems appeared with this approach. The most critical was probably the
injection. Connection problems could easily lead to more current being injected
than the accelerator can safely handle. There was a need for a system that
could control the injection process and stop it when the current limit was hit,
without any intervention from the operator.
With this done, we thought about going further with this idea, automate every
aspect of day-to-day accelerator operation. This is how the OneButtonMachine
application was born.