Reliability Modeling Method for Proton Accelerator

Abstract

Reliability Analysis is an essential part of designing any complex system in order to predict performance and understand availability. However modeling complex systems has been a challenging task due to the large number of components and inter -dependencies. The options have been custom written simulation packages, requiring large investment of programming and debugging time; or standard commercial software running for many days. In our research we developed a hierarchical method to represent t he reliability model of Project X, * a proposed linear accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The system is first divided into subsystems small enough to readily simulate. Each subsystem is then separately simulated and parameterized so th ey can be represented as simple blocks in the top level system diagram. This allows standard, commercial software to model systems with many tens of thousands of components without requiring many days of computer time. Simulation were run and compared wit h data gathered from existing accelerators.