Speaker
Description
The future Inner Tracker (ITk) of the ATLAS experiment will replace the current Inner Detector to maintain excellent tracking and vertexing performance under the challenging conditions of the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). It must withstand significantly increased radiation levels and occupancy while handling higher data rates and extending forward coverage. At the same time, with more than 150 institutes involved, order of 10 million components, and assembly chains with more than 160 consecutive steps with complex dependencies, it poses unprecedented challenges in its construction.
To meet the strict quality and scheduling demands, the production of ITk components and assemblies is closely monitored using the ITk Production Database (PDB). The ITk PDB serves as a central system, ensuring full traceability by tracking each component’s history and lineage, recording quality control and assurance data, managing component variants and compatibility, and consequently enables post-installation failure analysis. As such the PDB as a single source of truth is a crucial component for the collaborative effort of ITk, both during and after its production.
Efficient interaction with the ATLAS ITk Production Database (PDB) is therefore a necessary and crucial part in the production, quality control, and integration workflows across all collaborating institutes. Alas, as assemblies grow in size and complexity during the project’s progression, transparent data gathering accompanying physical operations and automatised PDB interactions are essential to reduce human errors and ensure database integrity and completeness. For this, programmatic access via the PDB API enables the development of automation tools that standardise these workflows and support efficient database interaction.
This contribution presents CLApp, a web-based application that streamlines interactions with the PDB for the assembly of ITk outer barrel (OB) local supports (LS). CLApp offers tailored views, guided data entry, operation instructions, tracking of dynamic assembly parameters, and automated consistency checks — from gluing modules to a cell up to assembling cells on local supports. This way it reduces operational overhead and eases the management of the complex assembly records in the PDB by accompanying and guiding operators through each step of the assembly. We demonstrate how CLApp enhances the maintainability and usability of the PDB, and we outline future improvements building upon its framework.