Increasing the Relevance of Data Presented to the Operators in an Accelerator Control System

Relevancy assumes a critical importance in control system operation because of the large amount of information available. The information deluge impacts the following areas: If information is presented at too high a rate or in too large blocks, the operators may not comprehend it. If useless data is often presented in a given display, the operators may ignore all data presented by that display. If the context of the data is not presented, the data may be meaningless to the operators. If the control and display systems are not properly designed, peaks in the message generation rate may choke the system. This paper describes the techniques in use and under development at the Clinton P. Anderson Meson Physics Facility for increasing the relevance of data both for real-time operations and for long-term analysis of accelerator performance. Data sifting and organization for presentation and for compact storage is discussed.