Revised September 23, 1998

Revised July 27, 1998

Original April 5, 1998

October 27, 1998

The purpose of this note is to describe the formal global naming scheme for NLC devices. To begin with, the proposed scheme is intended for use in naming NLC beam line components (magnets, accelerators, diagnostics, etc.), however the scheme should be flexible enough to be extended to other NLC components.

The global naming scheme makes references to individual NLC devices unambiguous, and allow us to enumerate global device lists for engineering and cost estimates. The unique name of each device will provide a first level key into the databases that will be used for cost estimation and scheduling, as well as providing the essential tag needed during production and installation, and by the future NLC control system. Because the name includes information on what a device is and where it is located, lists sorted by device type or geographical region can be constructed by keying off portions of the name.

The Formal Device Name consists of four (4) fields:

1. AREA: A physical area of the NLC. Initial areas are beam line designations (e.g. EDR or PFF1) and are defined by the modeling decks. Additional areas for support buildings, alcoves etc. are added as required.
2. TYPE: A generic device type. Initial types are defined by the modeling decks (e.g. QUAD or HCOR) with many others added as required.
3. UNIT: For beamline devices, this is a positive decimal number related to a device’s location along the beam line. For non-beamline devices this may be an ordinal or encoded number to uniquely identify a specific device.
4. QUAL: An optional field used to uniquely identify devices of the same TYPE and  UNIT number.

A colon (:) is normally used to separate the fields although other delimeters may be used for special purposes. The AREA, TYPE and UNIT fields are required. The QUAL field is optional and is used to uniquely identify different devices with the same type and unit number. At this time there is no limit on the number of character positions assigned to each field, although brevity is desirable. For consistency, all device names are upper case, although we should avoid making the names case sensitive. Each field except UNIT consists of alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9); the special characters "-" (dash) and "_" (underscore) will also be allowed. Some examples of device names are:

EDR:QUAD:234

PBSTR:VACP:1234:A

Each device may have one or more additional names associated with it, both in the primary database and in the optics decks. These secondary names will include (where appropriate):

• an engineering name which cross references lists of physical attributes, cost information, etc. for the device type (as in Dieter Walz’s magnet flavors document)
• an association name which links devices that are grouped (like magnets on a string connected to a common power supply)
• a common name (something easier to look at than the formal device name, e.g. QD1 rather than EFF1:QUAD:1723 for the final doublet)

These additional names will provide the necessary links to the engineering specifications of the device so that a straightforward comparison between device requirements and capabilities can be made.