Speaker
Description
Deciding whether to replace an entire population of equipment of a given type, and when, is rarely a question that a single system can answer on its own. For CERN's Hardware Infrastructure Team (HIT), this decision depends on knowing what equipment exists, how it has performed historically, and where it sits in its lifecycle; information that has traditionally lived in separate, disconnected sources.
This poster looks at how three outputs of the Controls Hardware Data Management (CHDM) initiative, the HIT Hardware Catalogue, the HIT Reliability Dashboard, and the underlying HITDB aggregation layer, are used together to support these decisions in practice. The Hardware Catalogue, developed in 2025 to replace over 300 individually maintained wiki pages, gives a consolidated, database-driven view of each part's identification, documentation, stock and pricing. The HIT Reliability Dashboard complements this with metrics such as MTBF, failure rates and Weibull-based end-of-life estimates, derived from asset state-transition history.
Combining these sources is now central to planning the end-of-life replacement of CERN's current Front-End installations. The poster presents this approach and reflects on the costs and effort involved.