Management technology designed for change
The cooperative repositories and information system for tracking assembly lifecycles (CRISTAL) was designed at the time of the compact muon solenoid's (CMS) construction. There was a need for software that could track the production of almost 80 000 lead tungstate crystals for the electromagnetic calorimeter. With EU funding of the CRISTAL-ISE (CRISTAL-ISE: Discovering and managing e-business collaborations) project, researchers enhanced this software platform to allow tracking of all kinds of information. The new Java application has a wide variety of potential uses outside of particle physics. The first version of CRISTAL was a 'description-driven' system, and users who developed models of systems needed to define them only once to create usable applications. Its flexibility has been proven by modelling business processes as well as human resource management. The CRISTAL-ISE team brought the software up to modern standards and made it even more modular. It provides the flexibility needed to handle the complexity of data-intensive systems and can adapt to any process where workflow and data traceability is crucial. CRISTAL-ISE is easier to use than its predecessor. More importantly, the new version has been released as a free and open-source software on GitHub, allowing both researchers and companies to improve its code and make it even more flexible. Development of CRISTAL-ISE was possible thanks to collaborative research, knowledge exchange, and many secondments from academia to industry and vice versa. Moreover, the project fostered new strategic partnerships between European software suppliers and users. Further work based on the CRISTAL software is expected to find market-oriented applications in the financial, healthcare and public sector.
Keywords
Data-tracking software, CRISTAL, CRISTAL-ISE, Java, open-source software
