Status of ESRF alignment facilites WPS ready for an automatic 2D smoothing of a storage ring

The alignment Team of ESRF accelerator complex introduced a new concept for the geometric maintenance of the sensitive magnetic elements of the storage ring and aimed to achieve realignment with beam on within a few hours. The previous challenge of this team only concerned the vertical realignment of a storage ring. Here, it was demonstrated that the same principle can be applied to the horizontal plane, but the implementation of this system raised serious practical difficulties. In order to improve the situation and the reliability of operation, a pseudoalignment on a monthly basis during the first two days of shutdown was organized. And it was demonstrated that saving in time often results in the detriment of quality. Thus, Quality Assurance programme was started to improve reliability of results and time for intervention in 1995. The operation of HLS network has proved successful in terms of reliability and time savings. Since the authors are dependent on the heavy beam schedule incompatible with the radial position maintenance schedule (dR) for the storage ring, they have been working on a smoothing programme using WPS. The WPS should enable us to obtain the same time savings as the HLS. The importance of attracting the interest of Industry to develop simple standardized actuators should be stressed so that metrological turnkey systems will be available on the market. (M.N.)