Because a large accelerator has so many hardware and software parts, some type of automated assistance is necessary for maintenance and fault history analysis. Just about everyone involved with accelerator operations. While anyone can report a problem, operators and machine physicists are the originators of most of the trouble reports. Hardware and software maintenance personnel solve the problems. Other operations personnel track maintenance history, looking for recurring problems.
Management decides when things are really fixed and close out open problems.
Thus anyone with a VMS account can use it. It uses the VMS Rdb database for storing all problem and solution information and a VMS specific screen management package for the user interface. I guess we'll start with the basic functions and then go to the user interface. Any valid user can enter or modify a problem report. Any valid user can enter or modify a problem solution.