CRISTAL (Cooperative Repositories & Information System for Tracking Assembly Lifecycle) is a Java application written to manage the gathering of production data during the ongoing construction of the Electromagnetic Calorimeter of the Compact Muon Solenoid, which is part of the new Large Hadron Collider, at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), which invented web.
The final product of a long and tortuous project; CRISTAL is a description-driven system, which means that the data structures and workflow-driven behaviour of the business objects in the system can be reconfigured at any time. It also supports versioning of these definitions, so the old ones will still work when you do. Collected data may be mirrored into several different databases concurrently, including your favourite RDBMS, and so can be queried for management summary data.
The Cristal 2 has been in production since August 2003 in ECAL at CERN, and is also used for Preshower construction in CERN, Greece, Russia and Taiwan. The technology has also been adapted for use in industry as a BPM solution by Agilium. A new company, Technoledge, have started developing a new production-line management system using CRISTAL for hi-tech manufacturing.
Some technologies used for all of this are: XML, CORBA, OpenLDAP, Java, Xerces, BSF and Castor.
CRISTAL is now built and hosted on the UWE CCCS Redmine server.
Last modified Friday 26th July 2013 by Andrew Branson