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In this talk, the dependability of CERN's Beam Instrumentation (BI) in 2017 is presented. All faults which contributed to LHC downtime are analysed, categorised and compared to previous years to isolate recurrent failures and evaluate trends. Special attention is given to the Beam Loss Monitoring system and its System Sanity Checks which was the highest contribution to the BI downtime in 2017. Finally, actions taken to remedy the situation as well as ongoing reliability analysis and upgrade efforts to improve the overall performance in the future are discussed.

This papers reviews the implemented improvements, operational experience, and performance reach of the major LHC Beam Instrumentation systems, excluding transverse beam profile diagnostics, throughout the LHC Run 2. The major hardware and software changes since the Long Shutdown 1 (LS1) are highlighted and the main actions addressing the remaining open issues during the Long Shutdown 2 (LS2) are listed. An outlook for the post-LS2 commissioning is provided based on the experience gained during the Run 2 commissioning period.

In this contribution, a review of the beam instrumentation status in the LHC 2016 Run is presented. The treated devices are the beam loss monitors based on diamond detectors, the beam position monitors, the wire-scanners, the beam gas vertex detector and the synchrotron radiation monitors. The new features implemented and the issues encountered during 2016's operation will be highlighted for each instrument. Additionally, the interventions and improvements planned for the coming winter shutdown will be discussed.

In total, over 5700 changes to the BLM thresholds were made during 2015. The new thresholds are based on the operational experience from Run 1, on new simulation models and on results from quench tests performed so far. Following the first experiences with operation at 6.5 TeV, a series of adjustments were made throughout the first operational year of Run 2. An overview of the main changes since the start of the LHC operation and their impact on the machine protection will be presented, focusing on the impact on availability during operation in 2015. The paper will conclude by discussing the remaining main updates, and by proposing a threshold strategy for the start-up in 2016.

During Long Shutdown 1 the Beam Loss Monitoring system went through several hardware upgrades and general maintenance. Many elements of the system, starting from the tunnel detectors to the threshold-comparator cards were brought from their locations to the lab and refurbished. Almost 30% of the detectors will be reinstalled in new positions, optimizing system sensitivity to so called UFO losses. In order to tune the thresholds on cold magnets a series of quench tests has been performed during Run 1. An extensive analysis of these tests has been done leading to suggestions of a new sets of beam abort thresholds. The threshold setting strategy has been proposed. New tool to generate and set thresholds is being developed.

The status and commissioning plans of the transfer line and injection hardware are presented with focus on the injection dump and kickers. Modifications of the beam loss monitoring in the injection region, its readiness for the start-up and commissioning strategy are shown. A new interlock strategy for the injection protection elements and the injection septum is introduced. The expected transfer line stability and possibilities to improve the turnaround with optimized SPS supercycles for LHC injection are discussed.

A new Beam Loss Monitoring (BLM) system is under development at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) within the LHC Injector Upgrade (LIU) project. The multi-channel system will have the ability to measure beam losses from various types of detectors with high precision and wide dynamic range. Several modes of data acquisition are supported. The data rate in the singlechannel mode is 16 Mbps and in the multi-channel mode 128 Mbps. The Gigabit Ethernet link is implemented in an FPGA, which allows both a high throughput and a quick validation of the digital data processing algorithms using standard PCs in the initial stages of the development. Both TCP and UDP protocols were explored. The implementation of the Ethernet link is flexible and proved to be highly reliable, leading to its planned use in other measurement systems developed at CERN. The implementation details of the Ethernet link and the results achieved will be described in this paper.

The strategy for machine protection and quench prevention of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) is mainly based on the Beam Loss Monitoring (BLM) system. The LHC BLM system is one of the most complex and large instrumentation systems deployed in the LHC. In addition to protecting the collider, the system also needs to provide a means of diagnosing machine faults and deliver feedback of the losses to the control room as well as to several systems for their setup and analysis. In order to augment the dependability of the system several layers of supervision has been implemented internally and externally to the system. This paper describes the different methods employed to achieve the expected availability and system fault detection.

The operation and machine protection of accelerators practically rely on their underlying instrumentation systems and a failure of any of those systems could pose a significant impact on the overall reliability and availability. In order to improve the detection and in some cases the prevention of failures, a survey mechanism could be integrated to the system that collects crucial information about the current system status through a number of acquisition modules. The implementation and integration of such a method is presented with the aim to standardize the implementation, where the acquisition modules share a common build and are connected through a standardized interface to a survey reader. The reader collects regularly data and controls the readout intervals. The information collected from these modules is used locally in the FPGA device to identify critical system failures and results in an immediate failsafe reaction with the data also transmitted and stored in external databases for offline analysis.

Three Different Concepts of High Dynamic Range and Dependability Optimised Current Measurement Digitisers for Beam Loss Systems will be compared on this paper. The first concept is based on Current to Frequency Conversion, enhanced with an ADC for extending the dynamic range and decreasing the response time. A summary of 3 years’ worth of operational experience with such a system for LHC beam loss monitoring will be given. The second principle is based on an Adaptive Current to Frequency Converter implemented in an ASIC. The basic parameters of the circuit are discussed and compared with measurements. Several measures are taken to harden both circuits against single event effects and to make them tolerant for operation in radioactive environments. The third circuit is based on a Fully Differential Integrator for enhanced dynamic range, where laboratory and test installation measurements will be presented. All circuits are designed to avoid any dead time in the acquisition and have reliability and fail safe operational considerations taken into account.

The aim of the BLM Dual Polarity module under development at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) is to measure and digitise with high precision the current produced by several types of beam loss detectors. In its default configuration, it is expected to provide data to the processing electronics through two point-to-point connections with bidirectional multi-gigabit optical links. For the development phases as well as later serving as a standalone measurement system, its reconfigurable FPGA device is exploited to provide a soft-core CPU with a custom made server. This server, running on the CPU, will expose through the Gigabit Ethernet connection and the TCP/IP protocol different types of data in the network. In this paper the development of the system and of the communication protocol is explored as well as the accompanying client ap- plication that is realised with the purpose of commanding, collecting storing and viewing the different types of data.

The strategy for beam setup and machine protection of the accelerators at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) is mainly based on its Beam Loss Monitoring (BLM) systems. For their upgrade to higher beam energies and intensities, a new BLM system is under development with the aim of providing faster measurement updates with higher dynamic range and the ability to accept more types of detectors as input compared to its predecessors. In this paper, the architecture of the complete system is explored giving an insight to the design choices made to provide a highly reconfigurable system that is able to fulfil the different requirements of each accelerator using reprogrammable devices.

The aim of the Beam Loss Monitoring Dual Polarity (BLEDP) module under development at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) is to measure and digitise with high precision the current produced by several types of beam loss detectors. The BLEDP module consists of eight analogue channels each with a fully differential integrator and an accompanying 16 bit ADC at the output of each analogue integrator. The on-board FPGA device controls the integral periods, instructs the ADC devices to perform measurements at the end of each period and collects the measurements. In the next stage it combines the number of charge and discharge cycles accounted in the last interval together with the cycle fractions observed using the ADC samples to produce a digitised high precision value of the charges collected. This paper describes briefly the principle of the fully differential integrator and focuses on the algorithm employed to process the digital data.

Unidentified falling objects (UFOs) are potentially a major luminosity limitation for nominal LHC operation. They are presumably micrometer sized dust particles which lead to fast beam losses when they interact with the beam. With large-scale increases and optimizations of the beam loss monitor (BLM) thresholds, their impact on LHC availability was mitigated from mid 2011 onwards. For higher beam energy and lower magnet quench limits, the problem is expected to be considerably worse, though. In 2011/12, the diagnostics for UFO events were significantly improved: dedicated experiments and measurements in the LHC and in the laboratory were made and complemented by FLUKA simulations and theoretical studies. The state of knowledge, extrapolations for nominal LHC operation and mitigation strategies are presented

UFOs ("Unidentified Falling Objects") are expected to be one of the major known performance limitation of the LHC. In this MD, the production mechanism and the dynamics of UFOs at the injection kicker magnets (MKIs) and the tune kicker magnets (MKQs) were studied. This was done by pulsing the MKIs and MKQs on a gap in the partly filled machine. During the MD, in total 58 UFO-type beam loss patterns were observed directly after pulsing the MKIs. None were observed after pulsing the MKQs, which provides important input for possible mitigation strategies. The temporal and spatial distribution of the UFO events could be determined by using a dedicated BLM Study Buffer, the implications for the UFO dynamics are discussed.

UFOs (Unidentified Falling Objects) are potentially a major luminosity limitation for nominal LHC operation. With large-scale increases of the BLM thresholds, their impact on LHC availability was mitigated in the second half of 2011. For higher beam energy and lower magnet quench limits, the problem is expected to be considerably worse, though. Therefore, in 2011, the diagnostics for UFO events were significantly improved, dedicated experiments and measurements in the LHC and in the laboratory were made and complemented by FLUKA simulations and theoretical studies. In this paper, the state of knowledge is summarized and extrapolations for LHC operation after LS1 are presented. Mitigation strategies are proposed and related tests and measures for 2012 are specified.

Injection losses are compared for 2010 and 2011 operation. Mitigation techniques which were put in place in 2010 to reduce losses at injection are described. Issues in 2011 operation, their potential improvements and the performance reach for 2012 are shown.

The history and motivation of dump threshold changes for the Beam Loss Monitoring (BLM) system throughout the 2012 run are described here. Also discussed are several dedicated beam experiments to probe the quench levels at different time scales foreseen for the end of the current run. The implications of these results to the threshold strategy are outlined. Moreover, the noise inherent to the BLM system may become an operational limitation in 2014 if running with the current dump thresholds. The most critical locations are discussed and revised thresholds are proposed that would mitigate the problem. Finally, the installation of new BLMs or the relocation of existing ones will require modifications that are explained in this document.

UFOs (“ Unidentified Falling Objects”) could be one of the major performance limitations for nominal LHC operation. Therefore, in 2011, the diagnostics for UFO events were significantly improved, dedicated experiments and measurements in the LHC and in the laboratory were made and complemented by FLUKA simulations and theoretical studies. The state of knowledge is summarized and extrapolations for LHC operation in 2012 and beyond are presented. Mitigation strategies are proposed and related tests and measures for 2012 are specified.

Unexpected beam loss might lead to a transition of the accelerator superconducting magnet to a normal conducting state. The LHC beam loss monitoring (BLM) system is designed to abort the beam before the energy deposited in the magnet coils reach a quench-provoking level. In order to verify the threshold settings generated by simulation, a series of beam-induced quench tests at various beam energies has been performed. The beam losses are generated by means of an orbital bump peaked in one of main quadrupole magnets (MQ). The analysis includes not only BLM data but also the quench protection system (QPS) and cryogenics data. The measurements are compared to Geant4 simulations of energy deposition inside the coils and corresponding BLM signal outside the cryostat.

The Beam Loss Monitoring system (BLM) for the LHC consists of about 3600 Ionization Chambers (IC) located around the ring. Its main purpose is to request a beam abort when the measured losses exceed a certain threshold. The BLM detectors integrate the measured signals in 12 different time intervals (running from 40us to 83.8s) enabling for a different set of abort thresholds depending on the duration of the beam loss. Furthermore, 32 energy levels running from 450GeV to 7TeV account for the fact that the energy density of a particle shower increases with the energy of the primary particle, i.e. the beam energy. Thus, a set of ! 3600 × 12 × 32 = 1.3 · 106 thresholds must be handled. These thresholds are highly critical for the safety of the machine and depend to a large part on human judgment, which cannot be replaced by automatic test procedures. The BLM team has defined well established procedures to compute, set and check new BLM thresholds, in order to avoid and/or find non-conformities due to manipulation. These procedures, as well as the tools developed to automate this process are described in detail in this document.

In this talk, an overview will be pro­vid­ed on the nec­es­sary steps a new pro­ject will need to take to en­sure the re­quire­ments in terms of re­silience to the dose ac­cu­mu­lat­ed and sin­gle event ef­fects. Information will be given on the dif­fer­ent de­sign op­tions and the avail­able tools de­sign­ers can em­ploy to aug­ment the tol­er­ance of the sys­tem as well as the tech­niques de­vel­oped to mit­i­gate the prob­lems that can arise in ra­di­a­tion en­vi­ron­ments. It will be also shown how the knowl­edge of the ex­pect­ed flu­ence and flux, to­geth­er with the given spec­i­fi­ca­tions will dic­tate the con­cep­tu­al de­sign, the com­po­nent choic­es lim­it­ed to use, and the re­quired val­i­da­tion and qual­i­ty as­sur­ance through ir­ra­di­a­tion test­ing that will be nec­es­sary to be under­tak­en.

Due to rapid progress with the LHC commissioning in 2010, set-up beam intensities were soon surpassed and damage potential was reached. One of the key systems for machine protection is the beam loss monitoring (BLM) system. Around 4000 monitors are installed at likely or critical loss locations. Each monitor has 384 associated beam abort thresholds (12 integrated loss durations from 40 μs to 84 s for 32 energy intervals). A single integrated loss over threshold on a single monitor aborts the beam. Simulations of deposited energy, critical energy deposition for damage or quench and BLM signal response backedup by control measurements determined the initial threshold settings. The commissioning and optimization of the BLM system is presented. Test procedures were used to verify the machine protection functionalities. Accidental magnet quenches were used to fine-tune threshold settings. The most significant changes to the BLM system during the 2010 run concern the injection, the collimation and the beam dump region, where hardware changes and threshold increases became necessary to accommodate for increasing beam intensity.

The CERN LINAC4 will represent the first upgrade of the LHC injection chain, by accelerating H- ions from 45 KeV to 160 MeV for charge-exchange injection into the PS Booster. In order to provide its safe and efficient commissioning and operation, a wide variety of beam diagnostics devices has been designed for installation at convenient locations all over the accelerator length and in the transfer line to the PS Booster. This paper gives an overview of all instrumentation devices, including those to measure beam position, transverse and longitudinal profile, beam current and beam loss. The well advanced status of the system design and the main instrument features are discussed

The LHC Beam Loss Monitoring (BLM) system is one of the most complex instrumentation systems deployed in the LHC. In addition to protecting the collider, the system also needs to provide a means of diagnosing machine faults and deliver a feedback of losses to the control room as well as to several systems for their setup and analysis. It has to transmit and process signals from almost 4’000 monitors, and has nearly 3 million configurable parameters. In a system of such complexity, firmware reliability is a critical issue. The integrity of the signal chain of the LHC BLM system and its ability to correctly detect unwanted scenarios and thus provide the required protection level must be ensured. In order to analyze the reliability and functionality, an advanced verification environment has been developed to evaluate the performance and response of the FPGA-based data analysis firmware. This paper will report on the numerous tests that have been performed and on how the results are used to quantify the reliability of the system.

The LHC Beam Loss Monitoring (BLM) system is one of the most complex instrumentation systems deployed in the LHC. In addition to protecting the collider, the system also needs to provide a means of diagnosing machine faults and deliver feedback of the losses to the control room as well as to several systems for their setup and analysis. It has to transmit and process signals from approximately 4’000 monitors, and has nearly 3 million configurable parameters. This paper will discuss its performance and ability to provide the expected measurements, the problems encountered and necessary improvements, the adequacy of related software and databases, and in general its readiness and suitability for 3.5 TeV operation.

A full-scale prototype of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) collimator was installed in 2004 in the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) and has been extensively used for beam tests, for control tests and also LHC simulation benchmarking during four years of operation. This operational experience has been extremely valuable in view of the final LHC implementation as well as for estimating the LHC operational scenarios, most notably to establish procedures for the beam-based alignment of the collimators with respect to the circulating beam. These studies were made possible by installing in the SPS a first prototype of the LHC beam loss monitoring system. The operational experience gained at the SPS and the lessons learnt for the LHC operation are presented.

The LHC beam loss monitoring system (BLM) consists of about 4000 monitors observing losses at all quadrupole magnets and many other likely loss locations. At the first LHC operation in August and September 2008 all monitors were active and used to observe the losses during the initial beam steerings, at collimators, at the LHC dump and during aperture scans. The different acquisition modes and their presentation are shown. Aperture scan loss patterns and a detailed loss pattern leading to a magnet quench are discussed. The observed signals of the BLM system are analyzed in terms of response time, sensitivity and noise performance.

The LHC collimators are protected against beam-caused damages by measuring the secondary particle showers with beam loss monitors. Downstream of every collimator an ionisation chamber and a secondary emission monitor are installed to determine the energy deposition in the collimator. The relation between the energy deposition in the beam loss monitor and the collimator jaw is based on secondary shower simulations. To verify the FLUKA simulations, the prototype LHC collimator installed in the SPS was equipped with beam loss monitors. The results of the measurements of the direct impact of a 26 GeV proton beam injected in the SPS onto the collimator are compared with the predictions by FLUKA simulations. In addition, simulation results from parameter scans for mean and peak energy deposition with its dependencies are shown.

A novel radiation-hardened current digitizer ASIC is in planning stage, aimed at the acquisition of the current signals from the ionization chambers employed in the Beam Loss Monitoring system at CERN. The purpose is to match and exceed the performance of the existing discrete component design, currently in operation in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The specifications include: a dynamic range of nine decades, defaulting to the 1 pA-1mA range but adjustable by the user, ability to withstand a total integrated dose of 10 kGy at least in 20 years of operation and user selectable integrating windows, as low as 500 ns. Moreover, the integrated circuit should be able to digitize currents of both polarity with a minimum number of external components and without needing any configuration. The target technology is the IBM 130nm CMOS process. The specifications, the architecture choices and the reasons on which they are based upon are discussed in this paper.

A series of LHC injection tests was performed in August and September 2008. The first saw beam injected into sector 23; the second into sectors 78 and 23; the third into sectors 78-67 and sectors 23-34-45. The fourth, into sectors 23-34-45, was performed the evening before the extended injection test on the 10th September which saw both beams brought around the full circumference of the LHC. The tests enabled the testing and debugging of a number of critical control and hardware systems; testing and validation of instrumentation with beam for the first time; deployment, and validation of a number of measurement procedures. Beam based measurements revealed a number of machine configuration issues that were rapidly resolved. The tests were undoubtedly an essential precursor to the successful start of LHC beam commissioning. This paper provides an outline of preparation for the tests, the machine configuration and summarizes the measurements made and individual system performance.

The beam loss monitoring (BLM) system [1] of the LHC is one of the most critical elements for the protection of the LHC. It must prevent the super conducting magnets from quenches and the machine components from damages, caused by beam losses. Ionization chambers and secondary emission based beam loss detectors are used on several locations around the ring. The sensors are producing a signal current, which is related to the losses. This current will be measured by a tunnel electronic, which acquires, digitizes and transmits the data via an optical link to the surface electronic. The so called threshold comparator (TC) [2] collects, analyzes and compares the data with threshold table. It also gives a dump signal through the combiner card to the beam inter lock system (BIC). The usage of the system, for protection and tuning of the LHC and the scale of the LHC, imposed exceptional specification of the dynamic range and radiation tolerance. The input current dynamic range should allow measurements between 10pA and 1mA and it should also be protected to very high pulse of 1.5kV and its corresponding current. To cover this range, a current to frequency converter (CFC) is used in the tunnel card, which produces an output frequency of 0.05Hz at 10pA, and 5MHz at 1mA. In addition to the output frequency, the integrator output voltage is measured with a 12bit ADC to improve the resolution. The location of the CFC card next to the detector imposes the placement of the card in the LHC tunnel, exposing the card to radiation. The radiation tolerance was defined by assuming a 20 year operation period corresponding to 400Gy. A mixture of radiation tolerant Asics from the microelectronic group at CERN, and standard component was chosen to cope with these requirements.

The Beam Loss Monitoring (BLM) system is integrated in the active equipment protection system of the LHC. It determines the number of particles lost from the primary hadron beam by measuring the radiation field of the shower particles outside of the vacuum chamber. The LHC BLM system will use ionization chambers as its standard detectors but in the areas where very high dose rates are expected, the Secondary Emission Monitor (SEM) chambers will be additionally employed because of their high linearity, low sensitivity and fast response.The sensitivity of the SEM was modeled in Geant4 via the Photo-Absorption Ionization module together with custom parameterization of the very low energy secondary electron production. The prototypes were calibrated by proton beams. For the calibration of the BLM system the signal response of the ionization chamber is simulated in Geant4 for all relevant particle types and energies (keV to TeV range). The results are validated by comparing the simulations to measurements using protons, neutrons, photons and mixed radiation fields at various energies and intensities.

The beam loss monitoring system is one of the most critical elements for the protection of the LHC. It must prevent the super conducting magnets from quenches and the machine components from damages, caused by beam losses. Ionization chambers and secondary emission based detectors are used at several locations around the ring. The sensors are producing a signal current, which is related to the losses. This current will be measured by a tunnel card, which acquires, digitizes and transmits the data via an optical link to the surface electronic. The usage of the system, for protection and tuning of the LHC and the scale of the LHC, imposed exceptional specifications of the dynamic range and radiation tolerance. The input dynamic allows measurements between 10pA and 1mA and its protected to high pulse of 1.5kV and its corresponding current. To cover this range, a current to frequency converter in combination with an ADC is used. The integrator output voltage is measured with an ADC to improve the resolution. The radiation tolerance required the adaption of conceptional design and a stringent selection of the components.

The strategy for machine protection and quench prevention of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) is mainly based on the Beam Loss Monitoring (BLM) system. At each turn, there will be several thousands of data to record and process in order to decide if the beams should be permitted to continue circulating or their safe extraction is necessary. The BLM system can be sub-divided geographically to the tunnel and the surface building installations. In this paper the surface installation is explored, focusing not only to the parts used for the processing of the BLM data and the generation of the beam abort triggers, but also to the interconnections made with various other systems in order to provide the needed functionality.

The superconducting Large Hadron Collider (LHC) under construction at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) is an accelerator unprecedented in terms of beam energy, particle production rate and also in the potential of self-destruction. Its operation requires a large variety of instrumentation, not only for the control of the beams, but also for the protection of the complex hardware systems. The Beam Loss Monitoring (BLM) system has to prevent the superconducting magnets from becoming normal conducting and protect the machine components against damages making it one of the most critical elements for the protection of the LHC. For its operation, the system requires 3600 detectors to be placed at various locations around the 27 km ring. The measurement system is sub-divided to the tunnel electronics, which are responsible for acquiring, digitising and transmitting the data, and the surface electronics, which receive the data via 2 km optical data links, process, analyze, store and issue warning and abort triggers. At the surface installation, the processing units (BLMTCs) include Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices. Each FPGA is treating the beam loss signals collected with a rate of 25 kHz from 16 detectors. It calculates and maintains 192 moving sum windows, giving loss duration integrations of up to the last 84 seconds. For the generation of the abort triggers, demanding the extraction of the circulating beams, it compares the moving sums calculated with threshold values chosen for the given beam energy. Those thresholds can be uniquely programmable for each detector allowing calibration and offset factors to be included. In this thesis, the BLMTC's design is explored giving emphasis to the methods followed in providing very reliable physical and data link communication layers, in merging the data from a Current-to-Frequency converter and an ADC into one value, and in keeping the moving sums updated in a way that gives the best compromise between memory needs, computation, and approximation error.

The BLM (Beam Loss Monitoring) system has to prevent the superconducting magnets from being quenched and protect the machine components against damages making it one of the most critical elements for the protection of the LHC. The complete system consists of 3600 detectors, placed at various locations around the ring, tunnel electronics, which are responsible for acquiring, digitizing, and transmitting the data, and surface electronics, which receive the data via 2km optical data links, process, analyze, store, and issue warning and abort triggers. At those surface units, named BLMTCs, the backbone on each of them is an FPGA (field programmable gate array) which treats the loss signals collected from 16 detectors. It takes into account the beam energy and keeps 192 running sums giving loss durations of up to the last 84 seconds before it compares them with thresholds uniquely programmable for each detector. In this paper, the BLMTC's design is explored giving emphasis to the strategies followed in combining the data from the integrator and the ADC, and in keeping the running sums updated in a way that gives the best compromise between memory needs, computation, and approximation error.

The beam loss monitoring (BLM) system of the LHC is one of the most critical elements for the protection of the LHC. It must prevent the super conducting magnets from quenches and the machine components from damages, caused by beam losses. It helps in the identification of the loss mechanism by measuring the loss pattern. Special detectors will be used for the setup and control of the collimators. Furthermore, it will be an important tool during machine setup and studies. The specification requirements of the BLM system include a very high reliability.