AUTOMATIC BEAM STEERING IN THE CERN PS COMPLEX

The recombination, transfer and injection of the four beams from the PS Booster to the PS Main Ring, have a high level of intri-cacy and are a subject of permanent concern for the operation of the PS Injector Complex. These tasks were thus selected as a test bench for the implementation of a prototype of an auto-matic beam steering system. The core of the system is based on a generic trajectory optimizer, robust enough to cope with imper-fect observations. The algorithmic engine is connected to pick-up monitors and corrector magnets and its decision can be val-idated by the operator through a graphics user interface. Auto-matic beam steering can only be ef®cient if the beam optics is fully con®rmed by experimental observations, a conditionwhich forces the systematic elimination of errors both in hardware and software. I