Behind the scenes of GS: the impact of IMPACT
Carrying out a job at CERN can be a complicated task, with coordinators reaching across departments to manage personnel, ensure safety and minimise the impact of their activities on the rest of the Laboratory. To help coordinators with this tough task, the GS Department developed IMPACT, the platform that, since 2011, has unified CERN's major experiment, accelerator and injector coordination tools.
When planning interventions both large and small, IMPACT (the Intervention Management Planning and Coordination Tool) is the go-to gizmo on every CERN coordinator's tool belt. "IMPACT is a central repository of activity requests that standardises the way work is declared at CERN," says Benoit Daudin, GS-AIS-PM Section Leader. "If you need to intervene in any of CERN's major facilities, you need to declare this work on IMPACT. The tool will analyse the job and see whose approval is required. This could simply be an experiment's activity coordination team, but it could also be passed on to Safety or Radiation Protection (RP) teams, depending on the nature of the work."
The members of the GS-AIS-PM Section, in charge of IMPACT.
As a GS-AIS tool, IMPACT takes advantage of CERN's existing databases (see image 1). It can send an activity request on to the right people in the coordination team, taking holidays into account (through EDH), provide teams with special access privileges, automatically record events in the LHC logbook, even integrate the right safety procedures to follow, such as a Joint Inspection Visit (VIC), Electrical Lockout or Dossier D'Intervention en Milieu Radioactif (DIMR).
In addition to these automated functions, IMPACT also provides coordinators with different ways to view the activities taking place. These can be sorted by site or by person in a user-friendly interface, so that any potential conflicts can be spotted. "IMPACT also provides similar tools to the Radiation Protection group," says Eloy Reguero Fuentes, IMPACT Technical Leader. "As it is tied into Dosiserv and thus the operational dosimeters, IMPACT can track the doses received by every worker during an intervention.” These are displayed in clear radiation reports, updated daily (see image 2), enhancing dose traceability for CERN supervisors, the people responsible for interventions, CERN Safety officers and RP teams, among others.
After recording almost 17,000 activities during LS1, IMPACT continues to grow in scope: in 2014, Linac4 and GIF++ joined the system and, since last month, all CERN surface interventions have also been included.
 |  |
| Image 1: at the heart of GS-AIS, IMPACT connects to many databases, including Dosiserv, EDH and ADaMS. | Image 2: a radiation dose report generated by IMPACT. |
