Speaker
Description
Ensuring high accelerator availability over multiple decades requires more than corrective maintenance and periodic upgrades. As accelerator infrastructures age, reliability is increasingly challenged by equipment obsolescence, diminishing industrial support, radiation-induced degradation, loss of expertise, and growing interdependencies between technical systems.
To address these challenges, CERN has established the Accelerator Consolidation Programme (ACC-CONS), a coordinated initiative covering the accelerator chain from the PS complex to the LHC and associated experimental facilities. The programme provides a structured framework for identifying, prioritising, and executing consolidation projects based on operational criticality, end-of-life risks, spare-part availability, safety requirements, sustainability objectives, and opportunities for performance improvement.
This contribution presents the rationale, governance model, and prioritisation methodology of the programme, with particular emphasis on balancing long-term reliability investments against resource constraints and operational schedules.
Rather than presenting a prescriptive model, this contribution aims to stimulate discussion on how accelerator laboratories address the long-term challenge of maintaining reliability in ageing facilities. CERN's experience in establishing ACC-CONS will serve as one example among many. Participants will be invited to share their approaches to consolidation planning, asset lifecycle management, prioritisation, governance, and funding strategies, with the objective of exchanging lessons learned and identifying common challenges across the accelerator community.