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At this year's ARC Advisory Group Forum in Orlando, Florida, David Widegren, Head of Asset & Maintenance Management, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland presented “CERN: Maximizing Uptime for the World’s Largest and Most Complex Machine.” CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) is the world’s largest research center for particle physics with 21 European member states and another 86 collaborating countries.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN contains about 100 million high-tech components for a 17-mile circular tunnel that is 330 feet below ground and cost $8+ billion. In it, sub-atomic particles are accelerated to nearly the speed of light to recreate a small version of the “big bang” at the beginning of our known universe.
Managing Millions of Assets
CERN uses Infor EAM to manage 1.8 million critical assets for both the particle accelerator equipment and the site infrastructure. This system has 1,100 users and processes 150,000 work orders per year. Assets at CERN often have a lifecycle exceeding 50 years. The long lifecycles, combined with the much faster turnover of personnel, make documenting both assets and interventions critical to success. This includes an inventory of the assets with detailed technical characteristics. CERN integrated the EAM system with over 20 other systems, including document management, control room, radioactive tracing, manufacturing, ERP, SCADA, GIS, reporting, and IoT-networked equipment.
Ease-of-Use Required
At CERN, the wide variety of casual users (from research PhDs to technician contractors) makes ease-of-use critical, since most users receive only limited training. Since different users have specific needs, the software has configurable profiles to fit the various types of users. The simplified interface is available on mobile devices, enabling broad user adoption with a high compliance rate.
CERN outsources over half of the maintenance. A common tool allows for shared methods and best practices, which in-turn brings operational efficiency and significant financial savings. The contractors fully comply with using Infor EAM, since managing work orders is a prerequisite for payment for their services.
PdM Benefits for Elevators
Using IIoT to streamline maintenance, CERN integrates the SCADA systems connected to the accelerator equipment. The LHC elevators are critical assets since they provide access to the accelerator 300 feet below ground. According to Mr. Widegren, integrating Infor EAM and Siemens WinCC optimizes the scheduled preventive maintenance to help achieve 50 percent less maintenance with a 5 percent increase in availability. CERN also uses IIoT for asset health monitoring and PdM that allows an asset to “raise a flag” to the EAM system when it has a problem.
When applying IIoT to maintenance, Mr. Widegren recommended filtering data for what is important, and go from “Big Data” to “Right Data” (see August 24, 2014 ARC Insight, “Small Data for Enhanced Asset Performance”). CERN stores half a terabyte of data per day for the accelerator performance (much less than the 100 terabyte of physics data stored daily). EAM is used to identify the critical assets and allow better filtering and interpretation of the “Big Data noise.” “Combining enterprise asset management with Industrial IoT enables us to maximize uptime and optimize accelerator performance, which in turn is the way forward to new discoveries that can change our understanding of the universe,” commented Mr. Widegren.
A video recording of Mr. Widegren’s Forum presentation is available here.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN contains about 100 million high-tech components for a 17-mile circular tunnel that is 330 feet below ground and cost $8+ billion. In it, sub-atomic particles are accelerated to nearly the speed of light to recreate a small version of the “big bang” at the beginning of our known universe. Managing Millions of Assets
CERN uses Infor EAM to manage 1.8 million critical assets for both the particle accelerator equipment and the site infrastructure. This system has 1,100 users and processes 150,000 work orders per year. Assets at CERN often have a lifecycle exceeding 50 years. The long lifecycles, combined with the much faster turnover of personnel, make documenting both assets and interventions critical to success. This includes an inventory of the assets with detailed technical characteristics. CERN integrated the EAM system with over 20 other systems, including document management, control room, radioactive tracing, manufacturing, ERP, SCADA, GIS, reporting, and IoT-networked equipment.
Ease-of-Use Required
At CERN, the wide variety of casual users (from research PhDs to technician contractors) makes ease-of-use critical, since most users receive only limited training. Since different users have specific needs, the software has configurable profiles to fit the various types of users. The simplified interface is available on mobile devices, enabling broad user adoption with a high compliance rate.
CERN outsources over half of the maintenance. A common tool allows for shared methods and best practices, which in-turn brings operational efficiency and significant financial savings. The contractors fully comply with using Infor EAM, since managing work orders is a prerequisite for payment for their services.
PdM Benefits for Elevators
Using IIoT to streamline maintenance, CERN integrates the SCADA systems connected to the accelerator equipment. The LHC elevators are critical assets since they provide access to the accelerator 300 feet below ground. According to Mr. Widegren, integrating Infor EAM and Siemens WinCC optimizes the scheduled preventive maintenance to help achieve 50 percent less maintenance with a 5 percent increase in availability. CERN also uses IIoT for asset health monitoring and PdM that allows an asset to “raise a flag” to the EAM system when it has a problem. When applying IIoT to maintenance, Mr. Widegren recommended filtering data for what is important, and go from “Big Data” to “Right Data” (see August 24, 2014 ARC Insight, “Small Data for Enhanced Asset Performance”). CERN stores half a terabyte of data per day for the accelerator performance (much less than the 100 terabyte of physics data stored daily). EAM is used to identify the critical assets and allow better filtering and interpretation of the “Big Data noise.” “Combining enterprise asset management with Industrial IoT enables us to maximize uptime and optimize accelerator performance, which in turn is the way forward to new discoveries that can change our understanding of the universe,” commented Mr. Widegren.
A video recording of Mr. Widegren’s Forum presentation is available here.