Speaker
Description
The free-electron laser FLASH at DESY in Hamburg provides high brilliance FEL radiation in the XUV and soft X-ray wavelength regime for user experiments. Starting in 2016 two separate undulator beamlines (FLASH1 and FLASH2) are being operated simultaneously, driven by a common superconducting LINAC. A third beamline is in use as alternative to FLASH2 to provide high current-density electron beams for the plasma-wakefield acceleration experiment FLASHForward. The accelerator is operated 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by a shift crew working in a three-shift system. In addition a machine coordination team decides on the schedule, machine upgrades, maintenance tasks, etc. The coordination team also handles the follow-up of technical issues which appear during operation. It is mandatory to have a steady exchange of information between the operating crew and the coordination team to achieve the most efficient and stable machine operation. On behalf of the FLASH coordination team we will describe the work flow and the tools we use to keep the machine operators informed about technical and operating issues and how the FLASH documentation and bug tracking system works. We will present the advantages and disadvantages of those tools and work flows and we will explain our ideas about future upgrades to combine different tasks in one common tool.
