Siemens Greece organized a visit at CERN with customers

Siemens Greece recently organized a visit at CERN, with customers from the industrial sector to present the facilities of the largest particle physics laboratory, which utilizes hardware and software equipment and solutions from Siemens. This year's visit was attended by representatives from Siemens’ customers ELVAL, MELCER and AKATT.

CERN, located in a northwestern suburb of Geneva, on the France-Switzerland border, is the world's largest particle physics laboratory. The laboratory provides state-of-the-art scientific facilities that allow physicists to investigate the fundamental nature of matter and the forces that act upon it, such as the enormous machines that accelerate tiny particles to a fraction under the speed of light. The experiments to detect these particles are built by worldwide collaborations of physicists.  

Aiming to optimize its resources utilization, CERN considered the use of Supervisory Control & Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems for the Detector Control System (DTS) of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. SCADA systems are generally used for industrial processes with their own specific characteristics in terms of scale, distributed nature and functionality. The big LHC detectors, as well as their peripheral systems, are very demanding applications for a SCADA system, as they are likely to contain in excess 1 000 000 I/O control channels. Therefore, a highly distributed control system is required.  

After an extensive evaluation of more than 100 systems from various manufacturers, Siemens’ SCADA, SIMATIC WinCC Open Architecture (WinCC OA) with its advanced technical capabilities emerged as the clear winner and was adopted by CERN’s laboratory. WinCC OA was chosen for a number of features such as its flexibility, scalability, support for various operating systems (Windows, Linux) and device-orientation that matches the way researchers model their data, among others.

The visit to CERN is taking place every year by Siemens as part of the strategic cooperation between the company's headquarters and the laboratory. In the context of this year's visit, Andreas Komninos, Vertical Sales Manager, Digital Industries, Siemens S.A., who accompanied the representatives of the Greek companies, claimed: "We are proud that our company is collaborating with a research institution, that makes innovative discoveries every day, both at the subatomic level and at the level of the genesis of the universe itself. SCADA systems are widespread in industry, so the purpose of this visit is to showcase perhaps the most state-of-the-art SCADA in the world to partners who are utilizing these technologies in their own businesses."