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UWE Computer Experts assist the construction of experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider

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23.10.2008

Computer scientists in the Complex Cooperative Systems (CCS) research centre at the University of the West of England have developed a tool called CRISTAL (Co-operating Repositories and Information Systems for Tracking Assembly Lifecycles) that has revolutionised management systems used to control complex workflow procedures.

Emanating from the work carried out by CCS on the management of the processes involved in the construction of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), one of CERN’s new generation of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, CRISTAL has enabled scientists to track thousands of constituent parts through hundreds of complex activities over CMS’s extended 10-year construction period.

Furthermore it has been developed with flexibility and adaptability in mind and can be reused across the industrial spectrum from concurrent engineering design to business process management.

Director of CCS, Professor Richard McClatchey explains, “CRISTAL is designed to deliver distributed workflow and data management infrastructures and support technologies.

“It provides ready solutions to many of the problems in commercial production management. The beauty of the CRISTAL system is that it has been tried and tested on one of the worlds most complex, demanding and high profile environments at CERN, but can be customised for use by companies and organisations in the manufacturing, telecommunications and many other sectors.

“CRISTAL can also be used as a management tool in areas such as bio-informatics and health informatics – for tracking research findings or for monitoring the efficiency of different treatment programmes. It is also effective for large-scale engineering projects when workers and managers in scattered locations need to know the status of a current work programme.” .

In the past ten years the CRISTAL technology has proven itself at CERN and has enabled the tracking of the over half a million constituents of the CMS Electromagnetic Calorimeter (ECal). It has gathered several terabytes of information about the history, calibration and testing of these elements so that the ECal detector can safely operate for the next 10-15 years in CMS. In doing so it has demonstrated the efficiency and application of the software engineering techniques employed by CCS personnel in the design of CRISTAL and its open, and extensible architecture has facilitated the re-use of CRISTAL in other domains.

CRISTAL has been developed into the Agilium product now being marketed by M1i in France and, in the near future, across Europe for process and product management in many domains including engineering, manufacturing and in the retail sector.

Richard McClatchey concludes, “We are very excited at the potential and capacity of Agilium to have a real impact on businesses, organisations and research. We will be studying a range of applications over the next few years with a view to establishing CRISTAL/Agilium as the software of choice for managing complex business processes.”

Jane Kelly | Source: alphagalileo
Further information: www.uwe.ac.uk
info.uwe.ac.uk/news/UWENews/article.asp?item=1367&year=2008

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