Reliability Assessment of the LHC Machine Protection System

A large number of complex systems will be involved in ensuring a safe operation of the CERN Large Hadron Collider, such as beam dumping and collimation, beam loss and position monitors, quench protection, powering interlock and beam interlock system. The latter will monitor the status of all other systems and trigger the beam abort if necessary. While the overall system is expected to provide an extremely high level of protection, none of the involved components should unduly impede machine operation by creating physically unfounded dump requests or beam inhibit signals. This paper investigates the resulting trade-off between safety and availability and provides quantitative results for the most critical protection elements.