The experiment’s equipment must fulfill the legal requirements of the French Agency of Nuclear Security concerning the nuclear installations. In order to ensure full traceability and to calculate the irradiation dose, according to the installation date, item’s history and current status, the database need to hold a Unique Equipment Identifier (barcode) of each item.

The large amount of information, collected during the design and the installation of the detector, as well as over the lifetime of the CMS experiment has to be checked for consistency, maintained and submitted to the corresponding users.

To meet these needs, in the CMS Integration centre at CERN, an integrated software system – Equipment Management Database (EMD) has been developed by the Bulgarian Academy of Science author as a reliable and easy to use on-line WEB interface for access to this data.

The user interface has been realised as separated dynamic pages with four levels of navigation and flow control – 3 hierarchical tab Menu levels and flexible Tree structure (Fig. 1).

The EMD system is built with Oracle Application Express (APEX) – a development environment for database centric Web applications. The choice of APEX is prompted by the fact that all CMS experiment’s data are stored in ORACLE servers. The EMD software has modular structure and nowadays consists of 4 modules:

● DATA BROWSER: A rapid interactive way to search, visualise and print information about the current status and configuration properties of sub-detector parts as well as the off detector electronics – racks, crates, boards, cables, channels, etc. This module provides tools for localisation of any detector part in 2-D visuals and printing statistical information.

● CMS MODELS: (Fig. 2) This interface holds up the database for both as-built & as-designed models of the equipment and the integration modules.

It provides search and display information tools on properties and physical position of the equipment and 3-D visuas of the model. The user can add new models after access rights verification.

● INB BARCODES: This interface provides full traceability tools of all modules (their history and current status) through an official CMS barcode label and performs a calculation of the irradiation dose for each item depending on its position and the time it was at this position.

● DATA EDITOR: User interface designed for insertion and modification of all properties of the CMS equipment. This module is restricted by an authentication mechanism and white access policy.

In EMD three groups of users with different access rights (defined per group) have been created – Coordinators, Detectors and Service Operators. Each user can belong to several groups. The level of access is specific to the User Role and the application automatically reconfigures the user interface according to this level. This ensures a high reliability and security of the application.

The Equipment Management Database is fully synchronised with all existing global or sub-system’s databases such as Rack Wizard, Cable Database, Geometry Database, Crystal, MTF, etc.

Each sub-detector holds up different application software to store information about its equipment with different structure and data format – .xls, Access database, Oracle. In order to integrate all data the author has developed external software to transfer them from .xls file (Fig. 3).

This application performs validation of the physical location of each record (the item’s hierarchy detector, sub-system, rack, crate, etc) and verifies the INB code (according to official CMS rules). If such record already exists, it is automatically moved into the table History. The software generates three output files – Accepted, Rejected and History in .xls format. Using this program simplifies input and synchronisation of data, improving the performance of all applications.

The integrated Web system Equipment Management Database has an open structure and provides opportunities to be extended with new modules and functional features. New modules to connect the database with barcode reader and radiation measurement system, the link to CERN waste database (ISRAM) and to CAD Design Data management System (EDMS, SmartTeam) are under construction.

The information set will be extended with new fields – material composition, procedures for maintenance, dismantling and disposal of the experiments.

The Equipment Management Database is currently being tested in CMS. It has proved to be a useful tool to search/display data sets and validate INB codes. Soon, it will be migrated to Oracle Production Server to be used on-line in multi-user mode. The implementation of the new features will make EMD a complete solution for asset tracking.