Planning, Managing and Executing The Design and Construction of Advanced LIGO

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Chapter 24
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the design and construction

of Advanced LIGO
David H. Shoemaker
LIGO Laboratory MIT, 185 Albany Street
Cambridge, MA 02139, United States
dhs@mit.edu
This chapter describes how Advanced LIGO came to be, as a case study for
planning and managing large-scale scientific infrastructure projects. A short
history is given along with motivations for the scope, timing and project structure.
The key documents, tools and organizational bodies that enabled the project
to be executed successfully are described. Several specific systems aspects —
contamination, testing, configuration and quality control, and fault recording —
are mentioned. Lastly, the project management approach is reviewed.
24.1 Introduction
This chapter is qualitatively different from the other chapters in this book,
as it examines how to take all of the science and technology discussed in
the other chapters and turn it into a working large-scale interferometer (or
two or three) — it is about the process, not the content. It is important to
mention that this chapter is focused on the Advanced LIGO experience and
the specifics are very much a product of the constraints and opportunities
associated with the LIGO Laboratory, the US National Science Foundation
(NSF), the ways in which science funding in the US works, and the like;
certainly an analogous chapter written about the realization of Advanced
Virgo or KAGRA would be substantially different.
We attempt to make the chapter most useful for future projects by gen-
eralizing where appropriate, but the experience is based on Advanced LIGO
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656 D. H. Shoemaker
and lessons learnt from both Initial and Advanced LIGO. While it will
principally reflect the actual approach we used for Advanced LIGO, where
appropriate, things we wished we had done will be noted.
The US NSF-funded LIGO Laboratory led1 the Advanced LIGO Con-
struction Project (hereafter referred to as the Project) and supplied most
of the physics, engineering and technical labor. The Project was undertaken
with funding from the US National Science Foundation as a Major Research
and Facilities Construction (MREFC) project and with most activities in
the US, which determined key constraints and structures for managing and
reporting. Generous in-kind contributions were made by the Max Planck
Society in Germany, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
in the UK, and the Australian Research Council (ARC); they were managed
in their home countries according to local constraints but consistent with
the Project requirements, interfaces and practices.
To establish the envelope, note that Advanced LIGO was proposed to
the NSF in 2003, the NSF National Science Board approval was given
in 2004, the baseline review by the NSF was in 2006, and the Project
formally started in April 2008. Installation of Advanced LIGO equipment
started in 2010 and the first locking of an arm took place in 2012. In 2014,
installation of the instruments was completed and the complete locking
achieved at one Observatory; the Initial LIGO sensitivity was surpassed in
mid 2014. Stability and sensitivity were judged sufficient for Advanced LIGO
to undertake its first observation run (O1) starting in September 2015. On
14 September 2015, the first detection of gravitational waves from a black
hole binary was made. Observing interleaved with further commissioning
continued, with the first detection of a neutron star binary made (together
with the Virgo detector) in August 2017.
The Project was structured such that the research and development up
to the point of completion of the Final Design2 was supported by the LIGO
Laboratory Operations funding (and by non-LIGO Lab groups in the US
and around the world); all activities after that were supported by the NSF
MREFC funding (or via in-kind contributions).
1
The leadership team consisted of Carol Wilkinson (project manager), Dennis Coyne (lead
engineer), Peter Fritschel (system scientist) and David Shoemaker (project leader). The
Laboratory Director at the inception was Barry Barish, Jay Marx during the initiation of
the project and establishment of its financial environment, and Dave Reitze through to
the close.
2
Final Design is the last formal design phase of a project and is typically completed before
a project begins construction.
Planning, managing and executing the design and construction of Advanced LIGO 657
24.2 The start of the project planning process

The Initial LIGO proposal in 1989 [Abramovici et al. (1992)] was for the con-
struction of the LIGO Observatory facilities and the Initial LIGO detectors;
however, it was explicitly stated that future detectors of greater sensitivity
would be needed, and an effort was made to make the infrastructure
compatible with more sensitive instruments. In parallel with the instrument

science and engineering required for the Initial LIGO detectors (and other
first-generation instruments elsewhere), there was a lively worldwide research
and development effort in the 1990s to find and demonstrate means to make
more sensitive instruments.
Specifically for Advanced LIGO, in January 1997, there were the first
meetings of the community (at the Aspen Center for Physics) with the
objective of coordinating research via the sharing of measurement science
and potential technologies, and enabling trades within technical domains.
To a certain measure driven by those meetings, in August 1997, the first
LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) meeting took place; the community
signed up to the concept of a constrained focused research program for
the greater good. The collaboration bought into the idea that to succeed,
a limited number of avenues could be pursued in parallel to solve given
problems, and we started to think about the problems in a more structured
“subsystem” environment. Models for the performance of subsystems, as
well as for complete instruments, were written, and some informal trades on
performance and points of departure for subsystem performance were made.
By 1999, a conceptual design Advanced LIGO White Paper [Gustafson
et al. (1999)] had been written, which was a plausible design for an instru-
ment with about ten times improved sensitivity at most frequencies over
the (yet-to-be-operational) Initial LIGO instrument design performance, and
a frequency response extending to roughly 10 Hz instead of 40 Hz. There
were still some significant options left open in the White Paper, notably the
material for the test masses (sapphire or fused silica) and the approach to
seismic isolation (passive multistage pendulums or a mixed passive-active
system).
In 2000, management and professional cost-schedule staff and tools were
applied to estimate costs. The Deputy Director of LIGO at that time, Gary
Sanders, played a key role in this process. Interviews with scientists, mostly
Lab folk with Initial LIGO experience, established a crude cost and schedule
baseline. There were discussions with NSF on scope, timing of upgrade,
and there was tight synchronization of NSF-supported research and the
Advanced LIGO concept.
658 D. H. Shoemaker
24.2.1 Pre-requisites
In our consideration of the timing to proceed with a proposal for Advanced
LIGO, we had a number of considerations that we took as pre-requisites:
• Astrophysics within reach of concepts: The next detector had to have a

high probability of detecting GWs;

• Key instrument design concepts prototyped: The design needed to be one
that, through both prototype measurements and well-based modeling,

could be realistically expected to deliver the sensitivity and reliability
required;
• Support from funding agencies within reach: There needed to be a model
for funding a project of this scale and positive responses to queries on the
scale and timing;
• A robust and committed community: The community needed to be unified
behind the conceptual design3 and the process to move forward, and ready
to make individual sacrifices in the directions of research;
• Timing consistent with other constraints: E.g., the need to collect one year
of data at design sensitivity with the initial generation of instruments.
In August 2002, the discussion in the LIGO Laboratory and the

greater LIGO Scientific Collaboration on the timing of a proposal reached
the point where guesses on Initial LIGO commissioning and thus the
astrophysics observation roadmap, the readiness of technical elements, the
readiness/availability of staff, and the readiness of NSF for funding looked
positive. There remained concerns about distracting from the commissioning
of Initial LIGO due to Advanced LIGO proposal preparation, but this
appeared tractable. The LIGO Lab leadership group decided to proceed
with the proposal to the NSF.
24.2.2 Alternatives to large projects

Along the path to submitting a proposal for a wholesale replacement of the
Initial LIGO detectors, we considered a number of alternatives, and these
considerations can also be useful for modifications to Advanced LIGO, much
3
Conceptional Design is typically the first design phase of a large scientific infrastructure
project, followed by the Preliminary Design and Final Design phases.
as Enhanced LIGO did for Initial LIGO. Some reasons to consider smaller,
incremental upgrades are:
• The lower cost and thus a lower threshold can ease the path for funding
and enable a quicker realization;
• Breaking down a significant change into smaller upgrades can allow a

shorter timescale of interleaving with observation on a given instrument
or pair of detectors;
• It enables interleaving downtime for instruments around the world for

continuous observation in parallel with improvements in instruments;
• It provides a real-world test of elements of parts of more ambitious
upgrades for both performance and reliability;
• Periodic smaller upgrades of the instruments keep the R&D team tuned
for creating new elements and thinking about the realities of realizing
detectors;
• This approach can “buy time” to allow more instrument research and
more astrophysics results to inform instrument design.
After considering these questions, we chose to make a very complete

one-time replacement of the instruments. The primary deciding factor was
the performance limitations of the seismic isolation and mirror suspension
system of Initial LIGO: There did not seem to be a path of small upgrades
that would lead in a finite time to the needed factor-of-ten improvement in
sensitivity.
24.3 Setting up the project

Once the conceptual design was established and documented in the White
Paper, we proceeded to set up the Project. A first step was to establish a
noise model that could be used for design trade studies. A MatLab script
with easily adjustable key design parameters was developed which reflected
the White Paper conceptual design [Finn (1997)].
We wished to choose a natural basis set of subsystems that would lead
to the Work Breakdown Structure (or WBS) with the following features:
• Natural technical domains, reflecting easy-to-define electrical, mechanical

and/or optical interfaces, and testable units;
• Efforts of a size such that a small leadership group could manage the
subsystem and remain in touch with the technical details;
660 D. H. Shoemaker
• Natural groups to carry through with the subsystem (e.g., those who had
been involved in the conceptual design);
• Geographical co-location. This goal could not be realized in Advanced
LIGO in many cases due to the dispersion of the conceptual design teams.
It was a tractable approach in this case due to past experience of the teams
(for Initial LIGO and during the R&D phase), but was not optimal.
Advanced LIGO chose a subsystem breakdown very similar to Initial
LIGO and the previous chapters of this book are organized along these lines.
That Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is:
• Facility Modification and Preparation, which encompasses modifications

to the permanent facility infrastructure and the site preparations required
for the assembly and installation of new detector instruments.
• Seismic Isolation, which serves to attenuate ground motion in the obser-
vation band (above 10 Hz) and also to reduce the motion in the control
band (frequencies less than 10 Hz). It also provides the capability to align
and position the load.
• Suspensions: The suspension (SUS) forms the interface between the
seismic isolation and the suspended optics. It provides seismic isolation
and the means to control the orientation and position of the optic while
minimizing the amount of thermal noise from the suspension elements
• Pre-Stabilized Laser, which provides the frequency and intensity stabilized
light for the Advanced LIGO interferometers, at the specifications required
at the entrance to the Input Optics (IO) system.
• Input Optics: The Advanced LIGO Input Optics (IO) subsystem condi-
tions and matches the light from the Pre-Stabilized Laser to the Core
Optics, applying phase modulation, and reducing the frequency, intensity
and geometric fluctuations in the process.
• Core Optics consisting of the test masses, beam splitter and recycling
mirrors; these large optics present similar fabrication and measurement
challenges
• Auxiliary Optics: The Auxiliary Optics subsystem (AOS), which is
responsible for (a) transport of interferometer output beams, (b) stray
light control, (c) thermal compensation (including diagnostic wavefront
sensing), (d) optical levers for alignment reference, (e) initial alignment
procedure and equipment and (f) the photon calibration/excitation
system. The unifying theme for the AOS work is in-vacuum optical layout
and beam transport.
• Interferometer Sensing and Controls, which consists of the length sens-
ing and control, the alignment sensing and control, and the overall
servo-controls infrastructure modifications for the Advanced LIGO inter-

ferometer design.
• Data Acquisition and Control, which includes all hardware, software,
integration and testing for the analog and digital signal conditioning elec-
tronics, computers, networking, sensors, actuators and excitation devices
for reading Advanced LIGO data and diagnostic data and operating
diagnostic systems.
• Data and Computing Systems includes all incremental upgrades to data
analysis systems and computational infrastructure needed to support the

analysis of data from Advanced LIGO.
In addition, there are WBS items which reflect the Project organizational
elements:
• Integration. The scope of the work of the Integration activity (IN)

includes the decommissioning and disposal of the Initial LIGO compo-
nents, the implementation of the vacuum equipment modifications for
all interferometers, the installation and initial checkout of the Advanced
LIGO subsystems, and the integration, testing and demonstration of
locking for each interferometer. Due to the large scale and scope, the
Observatory Installation activity and the subsystem test activity was
managed separately from the remainder of the Integration.
• Project Management and System Engineering. The scope of the Project
Management and Controls (PM) activity covers the project and technical
direction and oversight. It includes the functions of the system engineering,
the project management office, as well as of the change control processes.
It is useful to call out here some specific activities within this element
that are not skills that come along naturally with the small-scale R&D
development activity, but which are necessary to the successful execution
of the project:
– Quality control;
– Infrastructure specialists, e.g., civil engineering;
– Niche technical specialists, e.g., contamination/cleanliness;
– Site operations specialists — individuals with experience at the Obser-
vatories;
– An external Advisory board — senior scientists and engineers with
Project experience to offer criticism and guidance.
To gather similar technical challenges and manage large groups, we

formed “super-subsystems”: The Control and Data Systems grouping
662 D. H. Shoemaker
included both Interferometer Sensing and Control as well as Data Acqui-

sition, and the Lasers and Optics grouping included Lasers, Core Optics,
Input Optics, and Auxiliary Optics.
This organization of the Project worked well with one notable exception:
the Auxiliary Optics subsystem. As the conceptual design was worked
through to create a more detailed engineering design, it became clear that

we had underscoped the technical complexity of almost every component of
the “subsystem”. Thus, future similar projects should consider establishing
these activities as individual subsystems, but in generally, a consistent level

of conceptual design across the subsystems is needed early in the planning
to set the scope appropriately.
24.3.1 Refining the concept and the project

For Advanced LIGO, our next step after assembling core subsystem teams
and defining the basic scope for the subsystems was to carry out brainstorm-
ing sessions with subsystem experts and the technical and programmatic
leadership:
• Reviewing the conceptual design, checking to see if there were missing ele-
ments or elements that should instead be assigned to other subsystems, as
well as outlining in greater detail the natural breakdown of the subsystem.
• Making initial cost estimates for all hardware items, identifying weak
points in the cost estimates and initiating plans to refine those estimates.
• Discussing staffing for the subsystem, both for key personnel and magni-
tudes of the general skills needed to get to Final Design. For Advanced
LIGO, we needed this estimate not only to ensure adequate skills on
hand, but to build an estimate for the labor costs. In the NSF-supported
environment all labor costs were to be borne by the Project.
• Establishment of the timescales in bringing the subsystem to fruition.
R&D, development, prototyping, final design, procurement, assembly,
cleaning, assembly, test and installation were all given a first pass. We
sought to identify any dependencies on other activities. Activities that
need more work to be accurately estimated were to be flagged and given
priority (. . . and here is where Advanced LIGO did not follow through
with Auxiliary Optics).
This sketch of the project was iterated with the subsystem experts and
the technical and programmatic leadership to identify weak spots, places
where there were disconnects, and to look for opportunities — places where
the project could be simplified or more performance could be found. This was
then assembled into a “Project Book”,4 which gave a top-level description of

all of the subsystems and made projections for the performance that could
be expected. Some top-down estimates for cost were made and some notions
of the possible schedule also developed from the subsystem experts and the
leadership, with the LIGO Lab leadership broadly involved.
This White Paper and Project Book were presented to the LIGO
Scientific Collaboration, along with the costs and timescales, to get feedback
and community support. The data analysis and astrophysics scientists
started to look at what could be accomplished with an instrument of

this sensitivity. The interaction with the Initial LIGO commissioning and
observing was discussed, and the goal for the start of the installation of
Advanced LIGO was adjusted to try to match the completion of observation
with Initial LIGO. In retrospect, we had been too optimistic estimating the
commissioning time for Initial LIGO and about the speed with which we
could complete R&D, prototyping and design for Advanced LIGO, thus the
schedule moved considerably later than the first trial timelines, but with
both Initial and Advanced LIGO remaining reasonably well synchronized.
There is some optimal balance between “optimistic” schedules that cannot
be met and “conservative” schedules that tend to make for slower progress
than would have been possible.
Through this iterative process, we were exploring the feasibility of the
plan, the compatibility with the other activities of the collaboration and
Lab (including the commissioning and operation of Initial LIGO), and the
response of the NSF to our hoped-for scale of cost and time. In addition,
LSC partners started to look at engagement in the Project via in-kind
contributions. A consortium of universities and labs in the UK offered to
develop and deliver the test-mass suspensions and some optics substrates; the
Albert Einstein Institute of the Max Planck Society in Germany offered to
develop and deliver the pre-stabilized laser and a consortium of universities
in Australia offered to help with the Interferometer Sensing and Control
system and the wavefront sensing for the thermal compensation.
In 1999, the NSF received the Project Book and the LSC White Paper,
and had briefings by the Lab leadership on the scale and timing that the
Lab and Collaboration was developing. Having received encouragement from
4
The Project Book evolved into the Advanced LIGO Reference Design [Shoemaker et al.
(2009)], which was maintained as an evolving top-level description and status for use in
proposals and reviews during the early phases of the Project. It has not been maintained
toward the end of the Project, but the voluminous official Project documentation more
than adequately replaces it.
664 D. H. Shoemaker
the Collaboration and the NSF to proceed along the outline of Advanced
LIGO, the subsystem groups started to follow the detector development and
review cycle in the Guidelines for Advanced LIGO Detector Construction
Activities [Coyne and Shoemaker (2012)] that we established in Initial LIGO
and refined from that experience. That document lays out a fairly standard
process of developing requirements, conceptual designs, preliminary designs

and final designs. A lesson learned from Initial LIGO was that the process is
much more worthwhile if the reviews result in action items that are pursued
until they are resolved. While this sounds self-evident, we started in Initial
LIGO not following through.
Another lesson learned from Initial LIGO was that full-scale prototypes,
tested for not only performance but installation, alignment, electrical,
optical, mechanical interfaces and software were of great importance. One
interesting example is from the seismic isolation system, where a full-scale
two-stage test mass isolator (“BSC ISI”) was designed, fabricated and
assembled; it had been designed with the notion that flexibility in alignment
could lead to an ideal alignment of the various parts (to tens of microns over
meter scales). The assembly and alignment process was so time consuming
that a new design was made which used pins and alignment shelves that
made any adjustment impossible — and unnecessary. While the redesign was
expensive and time consuming, the result was a much more rapid cycle from
fabrication to completed instrument, with great repeatability for the plant
characteristics; control laws for the production units can start out identical
as a consequence. The re-work also reduced the overall cost of completing
this subsystem.
Advanced LIGO was able in particular to profit from Enhanced LIGO:
Initial LIGO with the addition of some of the key elements of Advanced
LIGO, such as DC readout, active seismic isolation systems, and the like. In
addition to the long-term in situ testing and refinement that this enabled,
the teams went through the process of a full preparation of materials for the
vacuum and contamination requirements, the installation procedure and the
possible types of user interfaces needed for the operation of the detector.
This was to be an extremely valuable rite of passage for the team.
24.4 Proposing for funding

Once the Project was on a solid footing in terms of the design and with its
costing and scheduling established, a proposal to the NSF for construction
funding was submitted in 2003. A NSF peer review recommended proceeding
with the project whenever the NSF felt it was programmatically appropriate.
In 2004, the National Science Board (NSB) judged that Advanced LIGO was
ready for funding in 2007 or later, with the caveat that one year’s worth of
Initial LIGO data at full sensitivity had to be collected first. Ultimately,
approval was given by the NSB and the Project was funded to start in
April 2008.
In the Project, three interferometers were proposed, with two to be

installed in Hanford. A phased implementation LLO/LHO was part of the
plan. The Proposal proposed sapphire as the baseline choice of the test mass
material, left open three options for the high-power-laser final stage, and did
not carry the option or plan of optically stable input and output cavities;
otherwise the Project, when implemented, corresponded fairly closely to the
Proposal.
The definitive accepted proposal was re-submitted in 2008, with sev-
eral intervening NSF reviews helping to focus remaining technical and
programmatic issues. Silica had become the choice of test mass substrate
and the Max Planck Albert Einstein Institute design for the laser had
been selected. The idea of using optically-stable cavities for power- and
signal-recycling was being studied, with the advantages clear but the
feasibility and detailed modeling yet to be done. The budget, contingency,
overall schedule, milestones and Project documentation were included in the
approved proposal.
Advanced LIGO’s development and design process through to its final
design was supported by the Research and Related Activities funding from
the NSF5 to the LIGO Laboratory and the greater US LSC, and by non-US
funding agencies elsewhere. All US activities after final design, up to the
point of successful locking of the interferometers, were included in the Major
Research Equipment and Facilities Construction activity. All salaries were
covered by this grant, in addition to the equipment, with care taken to track
the source of funding for all staffing via bi-weekly reports of the fraction of
time allocated to activities.
24.5 Forming the project team

As the work moved from R&D to more subsystem detailed design, the team
also took on a well-defined structure and added skills and size, appropriate
5
This “R&RA” funding is designed for research and for the operation of facilities like
LIGO. It is in contrast to the Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction
(MREFC) funding approach used for the Advanced LIGO Project per se.
666 D. H. Shoemaker
to the execution of the Project. The characteristics of the teams can be

generalized as follows:
Technical skills: It was critical that there was a balance of physicists to
help with the concept and analytical basis, and engineers of the right
disciplines to carry through with the realization of the design and later
the procurement, processing, assembly, subsystem scheduling and reporting,

etc. Our experience was that many physicists think they know how to do
engineering, but in fact do not. Thus, there was a natural transition from the
start where physicists dominated the Project organization and leadership,
to a latter phase where engineers were very much in charge.
Hierarchy: Some hierarchy in the organization was needed to coordinate team
activities and to best serve the needs of project management. For Advanced
LIGO, we sought not to have more than about 10 persons reporting to any
given leader. This allowed the leader to assume technical roles and maintain
enough engagement in the difficulties, in order to be taken seriously by the
rest of the team.
Leadership: We strove to pair engineers and physicists in leadership roles,
usually with the engineer taking the formal leadership role and the engi-
neering scope, and the physicist leading the physics team, but with many
successful exceptions.
Project experience: We tried to ensure there was existing experience or
training of the subsystem leader in Project skills of reporting, organizing,
estimating and leading, and that a realistic work load was planned for people
in those positions. We did not have universal success with the imperative that
the leaders “buy into” the formality of the Project management machinery,
and in some measure because the leaders had technical responsibilities
that competed with — and were more attractive than — management
responsibilities; we also generally underestimated the time and effort the
formalities would require to meet NSF’s growing expectations on this front.
Evolution: We found it was important to regularly check that the subsystem
basis mapped well to the existing teams as the Project moved forward, and
tried to facilitate any needed evolution due to either the maturing of the
design or to personality issues or clashes.
Co-location: We wished to make teams geographically co-located; in the
measure they were not, we planned for travel and communication to avoid
past bad experiences in Initial LIGO where we initially did not want spread
teams out, but had to do so in the end. We mostly had success with teaming
and in significant measure, because people had already worked together
on Initial LIGO, or had been previously co-located. However, it is certain

that our staffing need was increased and our progress was affected by this
configuration.
Advanced LIGO was organized within the LIGO Laboratory and the
majority of the team working on the project were employees of the Lab
or the Project. Thus, formally speaking, it was possible for supervisors to

order staff to carry out work. In practice, it was extraordinarily rare that this
path was taken to get the work done. Many of the team members had worked
together for many years — on Initial LIGO during the observation phase or
even during the construction and commissioning of Initial LIGO — and rela-
tionships of trust and confidence had long been established. New members of
the teams came into this environment and with few exceptions, adopted it.
The LIGO Lab has a tradition of engaging all of its staff in the larger
mission of developing the field of gravitational wave detection, and this
certainly contributed to the dedication and patience of the team in all
domains of technical expertise. Technical staff moved seamlessly from Initial
LIGO operations to Advanced LIGO construction and installation, and then
back to Advanced LIGO operations. The personal investment of the Lab
employees was exceptional and crucial to the success of the Project.
24.6 Documentation and communication

24.6.1 Key documents
Advanced LIGO profited from a structured approach, where key documents6
defined processes to be followed and described the organization of the
project. The NSF provides guidance for Large Facilities projects.7 We list
the key Advanced LIGO planning and prescriptive documents below.
• Project Execution Plan [Shoemaker et al. (2013)]: This is the key

document which is the contract between the Project and the NSF, and
(among other things) describes the research objectives and performance
requirements, work breakdown structure (WBS), budget and its basis,
contingency and its basis, schedule, organization, governance, configura-
tion control plans, QA plans, systems engineering, systems integration and
transitions to operations.
6
All Advanced LIGO technical documentation is publicly available at https://dcc.ligo.org.
7
Advanced LIGO followed the guidance in the Facilities Management and Oversight Guide
of July 2003; very useful current guidance can be found in the NSF’s Large Facility Manual,
available online at the time of writing at http://www.nsf.gov/bfa/lfo/, which is a wealth of
information and requirements for Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction
(MREFC) projects undertaken with NSF support.
668 D. H. Shoemaker
• Baseline Cost and Schedule: We chose to pull out the cost and schedule
information from the Project Execution Plan for ease in editing and to
allow it a limited circulation.
• Guidelines for the construction activities [Coyne and Shoemaker (2012)]:
This gives the roadmap for reviews that take the subsystems from concepts
to final designs.
• Testing: Subsystem-Level and System-Level Testing Requirements [Coyne
and Shoemaker (2014)]. It is important to plan these elements early when
naı̈veté and ambitions are high.

• Acceptance process [Coyne et al. (2015)]: We laid out a detailed plan for
the acceptance of the subsystems, installations, completed interferometers
and the overall Project.
• Risk Management Plan [Shoemaker and Wilkinson (2006)], Risk Reg-
istry [Shoemaker (2015)]: We used this approach to identify and track
risks. More discussion is found in Section 24.8.
• Change Control Procedure [Wilkinson et al. (2007)]: This is the formal
process that permits and acknowledges changes in the Project. These
changes can be programmatic and lead to changes in schedule, and/or
adjust the budget allocated to (or away from) an activity. It is also the
path for approving a technical change, which may require an action by the
Technical Review Board. An Engineering Change Request [Coyne (2013)]
is the method used to trigger a change.
More broadly, the Advanced LIGO documentation is available to the

public and can be found in the LIGO Document Control Center.8
24.6.2 Documentation tools

The Project used a number of documentation tools to fulfill the different
needs.
Document Control Center or DCC 9 : A document archive and search

tool [Vaandering (2015)] that had been developed for the BTeV collaboration
at Fermilab was adopted and adapted to the needs of the Project (and also
serves the LIGO Laboratory and LIGO Scientific Collaboration needs). The
key features of the system are its ability to keep track of versions; to
associate multiple files (source or related) with a given entry in the document
system; a flexible and powerful range of search tools; and means to associate
8
See https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-E1200123/public and the tree structure below.
9
https://dcc.ligo.org.
collections of documents in “events”. Document trees can be created through

hierarchical association of documents. Sign-offs of configuration-controlled
documents are implemented. Access controls allow, e.g., contract information
to be kept to a limited group.
All Advanced LIGO documents are held in the LIGO DCC and all
Advanced LIGO documents that are not cost, vendor or personnel sensitive
are available to the public.
Wikis and Google Docs: For “conversations” on technical issues, where many
people contribute in a dynamic way to a design or analysis effort, the
Wiki format was used. While this is convenient and certainly had a role
in the early phases of a project like Advanced LIGO, there are several
risks associated with Wikis: (1) information will be extremely uneven, often
mixing chronological (dis-)order with subject ordering, and mixing old,
obsolete ideas and results with up-to-date, valid ideas and results; and (2)
information will not be processed into a document that contains the useful
result of the wiki-based conversation. Trying to reconstruct only the enduring
part of the conversation after the fact can be very difficult. However, these
risks are not a reason to avoid this approach, but there needs to be follow-
ups with the technical teams to make the transition from the wiki format
to an archived document. Toward the end of the Project, other online tools
became useful for this sort of endeavor, notably Google Docs.
Electronic Log Books or aLOG10 : Electronic logbooks (multiple instances of
the “aLOG”) were used by subsystem teams during the development and
testing of prototypes and first articles, and to record all activities at the
Observatories. The software tool used was originally developed by Virgo
colleagues [Hemming (2010)] and adapted to LIGO specific needs. A style
guide was established to encourage quality entries and the mantra “if it is not
recorded in the logbook it did not happen” was invoked from time to time
to ensure that the record was truly sufficiently complete, enabling the entire
global team to follow and support the effort, and for forensics, if needed.
Issue tracking software: As the Project gathered momentum, it became
vital to manage problems and opportunities. This included the tracking
and resolution of software bugs and feature requests, integration issues and
Engineering Change requests. We adopted a software “bug” tracking tool,
Bugzilla, with minor tuning to make it better suited to the wider scope of
issues tracked.
10
For the Livingston Observatory, this electronic log book can be found at https://alog.
ligo-la.caltech.edu/aLOG/; for Hanford, at https://alog.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/aLOG/.
670 D. H. Shoemaker
Software/data Version Control: The very complex real-time control and data
acquisition software was managed via an SVN. In addition to code, this
approach was also used to archive the voluminous test data collected during
the subsystem test process.
Inventory Control: Inventory of parts and completed systems was kept
primarily in a custom-built Java-based system (ICS — Inventory Control

System). In addition, electronics records for design and test results were
stored in the Document Control system (DCS) mentioned above, making use
of the ability to associate multiple files with a given “file card”. In retrospect,
neither of these approaches had the flexibility, accessibility, reliability or ease-
of-use that was required, and a different commercial approach to inventory
management would have been preferable.
24.6.3 Communication tools

Due to the distributed nature of the Project team, excellent communication
tools were vital to success. There was some evolution during the Project
period and we note here the solutions that were the most durable.
• Voice: Criteria for a voice communication tool include quality of sound

(wideband frequency response, large dynamic range and low distortion),
low latency (to permit rapid dialog without participants speaking over
each other), low bandwidth requirements (to allow use where internet
bandwidth is limited), good anti-echo implementation, public and private
chat options, ease of joining meetings and finding individuals, ease of
installation and use, and low cost. The project adopted a software
application (“TeamSpeak”11 ), which has its origin in the gaming world.
This excelled in all of these categories except for the necessity to use a
hardware anti-echo solution and the lack of an integrated screen sharing
approach (see below). It has the additional virtue of being organized like
a virtual hallway — one can “naturally drop in” on a meeting or an
individual. Several systems with video capability were used during the
Project tenure, but at least the Advanced LIGO team had an allergy
to sharing images of themselves and the value added did not appear
significant in our limited trials.
• Visual materials: The team settled on using the LIGO Document Control
Center (DCC) for most materials which were to be shared during meetings.
The URL for the document could be pasted in the TeamSpeak chat
11
https://www.teamspeak.com.
window. One very strong virtue of this approach was the consequence that
all such documents were archived for future reference. For the situations
where pointing to specifics in a page, software demonstrations or dynamic
displays (e.g., shared design views with rotate and pan) were necessary,
the team used a variety of screen-sharing applications.
• Email: Electronic mail was, of course, intensively used to coordinate,

communicate and argue technical and programmatic issues, and to
broadcast Project-wide messages.
24.6.4 Meetings
The Project established a broad range of meetings to promote communi-
cation. In general, a given meeting would be composed of several to many
people in one geographical location and individuals, or small numbers of
individuals in other places linked with voice and sharing document pointers.
The principal meetings are listed below.
• A weekly meeting consisting of the leaders of subsystems, key Project

Controls people and the Management Team. This meeting was used to
flag new issues, communicate upcoming events and enable cross-subsystem
communication;
• The Systems Group held weekly meetings to communicate new initiatives,
rules, practices, etc., and to brainstorm on solutions to new problems;
• The Observatories and Campuses had weekly meetings to discuss geo-
graphically focused topics, including safety issues;
• Project Management/Project Controls held a monthly status meeting
to report on the earned value, ask questions about trends, and to give
feedback to subsystem groups;
• Each subsystem or major activity had one or several weekly meetings
to work through detailed technical issues and to establish plans and
assignments on a weekly basis;
• Daily meetings of groups focused on an assembly or test task were
established as needed;
• The leadership would give a brief status update at the Laboratory
Executive Committee meeting on a weekly basis; a detailed briefing would
take place monthly;
• The LIGO Lab and Project leadership spoke weekly with the NSF
Program Managers on progress, upcoming approval requests, etc.;
• The LIGO Lab and Project leadership spoke weekly to explore problems
and share updates;
672 D. H. Shoemaker
• The leadership group spoke twice weekly on a mixture of project manage-

ment and high-level technical issues;
• Of course, ad hoc meetings and one-on-one discussions were arranged to
address specific problems.
This rhythm of meetings often felt burdensome and some evolution

was incorporated to try minimizing telling people what they already knew
or things they did not need to know. The more general and broad a
meeting was, the more likely it tended to “broadcast” rather than enable
discussion, and those were the meetings that were most difficult to maintain
relevant and worthwhile discussions. In any event, the distributed nature of
the project, and in particular the distributed management of the project,
required an obligatory rhythm of scheduled meetings to ensure that a
consistent picture of the state of the project and the direction to take was
maintained.
24.7 Systems Group

The Systems Group for Advanced LIGO defined, guided and participated
in technical review processes, established and enforced interfaces between
subsystems, chose standards for mechanical, electronic and optical elements,
and had the responsibility for the ensuring adequate cleanliness. The Systems
Engineer also worked very closely with the System Scientist in trades between
the physics and engineering, and between requirements and realizations, as
various challenges and opportunities arose in the Project.
The systems engineering group assembled solid-body models of the
instrument from input provided by the subsystems, which allowed checking
for interference, establishing total payload and payload balancing, and
permitting the creation of installation and alignment plans. The group also
developed performance models at various levels of detail and with different
objectives to allow trades to be guided and to allow prototype results to be
fed back to any remaining free parameters in the overall design.
In the early phases of the Project, when there was significant parallel
effort in the development (funded by the operations grant) and engineering
(on the Project), the Systems Group managed the R&D and ensured it
stayed on track to feed into the Project phase. Due to delays in the
development, it was also necessary to re-order parts of the project, and the
insights of the Systems Group (both engineering and science) were critical.
The Systems Group also provided engineering support for the
subsystems. Specific skills in the group for finite element analysis, thermal
modeling, raytracing and integration of multiple models of systems to allow

opto-mechanical design to proceed, were in great demand.
We detail several specific domains where the Systems Group played
key roles.
24.7.1 Contamination
Advanced LIGO required very low levels of both particulate and hydrocarbon
contamination. Particulates on optics can cause scattered light (both a loss

in the optical systems and a source for noise due to light scattered out and
back into the main beam), and can also be points of laser light absorption
that can cause damage to the coating. Hydrocarbons can also coat optics
and cause absorption, and thus losses and risks of damage to the coatings.
We started the Project with requirements for these sources of contamination,
based on some calculations, some measurements of scatter and observation
of losses in Initial LIGO and some stand-alone measurements of absorption
in optical cavities exposed to various hydrocarbons. From this the Systems
Group developed a list of acceptable materials and processes for fabrication
and cleaning.
We also determined that the interior of the LIGO vacuum chambers were
shedding material, mostly due to the oxidization of the chamber walls. The
Systems Group developed and directed the process of scrubbing the interior
of the chamber walls.
It should be noted that despite these preparations and experienced-based
procedures, we found that during the process of installation, our components
were showing quite unacceptable levels of particulate contamination. The
Systems Group spawned a “tiger team” led by the Deputy System Engineer,
to research the origin of our particulates (just about everything but mostly
having to do with humans entering the vacuum system) and to develop
methods to mitigate the problem. With determination, some changes in garb,
a great deal of remedial cleaning of in-chamber equipment and changes in
procedures, we completed the Project with far better cleanliness than we
started, and it appears to be at an acceptable level.
The presence of hydrocarbon contamination was also a continuous
concern of the Systems Group. All components to be used in vacuum were
either baked at elevated temperatures, in clean vacuum chambers, using
residual gas analysis to determine an acceptable level of cleanliness; or, if too
large, were washed using water and solvent-based liquids, and with a Fourier
transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy assay of the residual contaminants
in the final wash liquids used to accept the piece. These processes, in
674 D. H. Shoemaker
particular for parts containing (acceptable) polymers, were extremely time-

consuming, requiring repeated cleaning and testing of many parts, and due
to the sheer volume of testing saw a number of accidents associated with
breakdowns in equipment and procedures.
For both particulate and hydrocarbon contamination, making quantita-
tive connections to materials and processes was very difficult, and we were
surprised a number of times by disconnects between models, measurements
and as-completed results; happily, most of those surprises were positive.
Certainly, a note for future projects is to assess this task carefully and
very early on in the design process, so as to try to minimize the risks and to
be able to set aside sufficient time and funds to address the problems that
arise. Advanced LIGO severely underestimated the challenge in the planning
and early phases of execution.
24.7.2 Testing
A very important feature of the Advanced LIGO Project which fell to the
Systems Group to manage was the approach to testing of the equipment. In
Initial LIGO, we made the error of insufficiently testing the equipment before
it was installed, and finding ourselves with a very complex instrument with
many elements not functioning correctly. In some cases, this was due to errors
in conception or in realization; in others it was due to “infant mortality” in
systems that were either excessively fragile or mishandled. Evidently, we
were able to backtrack to the weak points, and one by one (and in some
cases with wholesale substitution of improved subsystem elements) address
their weaknesses and still meet the sensitivity and availability goals of Initial
LIGO. This caused the commissioning epoch of Initial LIGO to be far longer
than desired and we were determined not to suffer that delay before observing
with Advanced LIGO.
As a consequence, we set out for Advanced LIGO with an ambitious
plan of testing, and documentation of that testing, to minimize this source
of delay to integrated testing (our nomenclature for the testing proceeding
locking) and the speed of commissioning (our nomenclature for taking the
locking interferometer to high sensitivity to gravitational waves). The main
components of the plan were
• Extensive prototype testing in the conceptual design phase,

• Testing of full-scale prototypes in early phases,
• Testing of final-design compatible prototypes or first articles,
• Exercising installation procedures in full-scale test facilities,
• Testing of parts and sub-assemblies of production units,

• Testing of complete assembled units at the site of assembly,
• Stand-alone testing of the complete assembled units after installation,
• Integrated testing of the units in situ with the rest of the interferometer.
At each of these phases we compared test data to the model predictions and
updated system-wide models with the consequences for overall performance.
We emulated the final environment for the testing as early as possible,
using full-scale LIGO vacuum chambers, electronic interfaces (and cable

lengths), data acquisition hardware and operational software to ensure that
interactions between elements were accounted for. We established automated
systems for testing those components, which were fabricated in sufficient
quantity to merit the approach. All raw data were stored for later re-analysis
and human-readable summaries of test results placed in the document
archive. Acceptance of a subsystem required the completion of testing and
a review of the test documentation.
This was certainly one of the most important elements of the Advanced
LIGO execution plan. The measure of success was the early rapid commis-
sioning progress made with Advanced LIGO, in severe contrast with the
Initial LIGO experience.
24.7.3 Configuration control and the technical review board

A configuration management process was used to ensure coordination of
changes and to assure that the technical, cost and schedule impact of
changes were considered. The configuration management process involves
configuration change control and configuration accounting/verification. The
technical baseline was managed throughout the Advanced LIGO project
to ensure that the system could meet its specifications and that these
specifications reflected the true configuration of the system. Configuration
change control ensured that the technical documentation properly reflected
the “as built” configuration.
For changes in the baseline design which met a threshold of significance
in cost (for equipment, staff or schedule) or perceived technical risk, the
Systems Engineer formed an ad hoc Technical Review Board. This group,
which might include any or all of scientists, technicians and engineers, was
charged to consider the change and a recommendation to pursue or not was
made (often with detailed technical suggestions). If the TRB recommended
a technical change with cost implications, the Change Control Board would
take it up to allocate funds appropriately.
676 D. H. Shoemaker
Once a technical baseline change was approved, the impact on design,

performance, scope and subsystems was recorded in the appropriate technical
documentation.
24.7.4 Quality control

The Quality Assurance effort was tasked to deliver a system that was reliable,
maintainable and with quality control over all components. We wanted,
however, to avoid formality in the measure possible (we wanted the result
more than the documentation) and we wanted to ensure that the mindset of
Quality Control was carried by all members of the team. The alternative, of
a large and separate QA/QC team, was not attractive and not within the
affordable scope of the Project.
Thus, we engaged a small number of engineers with QA/QC experience
and training and gave them the responsibility to
• Establish QA/QC procedures and processes and to document them;

• To carry out a rigorous “standard” quality control program with respect
to external vendors;
• To help subsystem teams define quality control procedures and within the
subsystem groups, using both QA/QC staff and their own staff to fulfill
the program requirements;
• To act as a Manufacturing Optimization office — to work with the
designers to ensure that the designs could be manufactured simply and
reliably, that the designs could meet contamination requirements, and
could be inspected and verified easily to fulfill QC requirements.
This notion of “embedded” QC officers carries some risk of ownership of

the designs by the very people who are charged to objectively critique them,
but the efficiency and effectiveness of the approach was almost universal.
In those domains where our limited QA/QC staff did not have technical
expertise, for instance in the fabrication of the main interferometer optics,
physicists took on the role with guidance from QA/QC staff. Over the period
of the Project, there were several cases where our system failed us; sometimes
due to vendors going “above and beyond” our wildest expectations of how
defects might be incorporated into the parts, sometimes due to a lack of
discipline with external vendors, and sometimes due to a lack of internal
practices. With the conclusion of the Project we can state that it was a
successful approach, which with only minor tuning could be made even more
appropriate to this Project’s scale and nature.
24.7.5 Fault recording

As the project advanced, a growing number of errors, conflicts and also
of perceived improvements were recognized. These were gathered by the
Systems Group and a standard “bug tracking” software system was used
to enforce a process to resolve the problems. They were cast into an
“actionable” form, assigned to an individual, and then reviewed on a weekly

basis by a small group consisting of the Systems Engineer and Systems
Scientist and the Site Installation Liaisons.
24.8 Project management and reporting

24.8.1 Advanced LIGO’s approach
Project management for Advanced LIGO was needed for internal require-
ments (to coordinate and allocate resources) and external requirements
(to provide the NSF with insight into the use of taxpayer funds). The
Advanced LIGO Project Manager came with both training and considerable
experience in applying modern techniques of project management to science
projects, and the Advanced LIGO Management team implemented a system
that attempted to satisfy the needs for project management but moderated
the demands on the technical team. Opinions varied in the technical team
on the balance achieved. However, the Project did end on time, on budget
and the NSF were satisfied with the reporting and insight they had into the
Project activities. Thus, the prime objectives of the project management
were met.
Good documentation of good practice in project management can be
found12 and so we only describe some elements that were particular to
Advanced LIGO, and some of the shortcomings seen in retrospect in our
implementation.
The Project Manager led the Project Controls (PC) team, a handful of
people who interacted with the technical leaders to collect and share infor-
mation, to handle the data entry and report generation by the software,13
and to format and write reports suitable for the NSF’s needs. Some things
to note based on Advanced LIGO’s experience:
Flexibility: One very important requirement for project management in
Advanced LIGO was agility, capability and the will to explore and adopt
12
See, for instance, http://www.pmi.org.
13
The software tools for Project Management used in Advanced LIGO were Primavera
and Prism.
678 D. H. Shoemaker
alternative scenarios. Several significant changes from the initial plan

were made — the adoption of stable input and output cavities, repeated
re-working of the schedule to accommodate late delivery of some components
while maintaining overall progress, and most notably the decision not to
install the third interferometer but to instead put it in long-term storage
for later implementation in India. The threshold for creating a “parallel

universe” with an alternate plan was reasonably high and so a lot of informal
planning on the whiteboard and sometimes in stand-alone planning software
such as Microsoft Project or Omniplan preceded the implementation of a

modified plan in Primavera. Flexibility is certainly a criterion to weigh
heavily in future endeavors of this scale, complexity and phase space.
Detail: The level of detail tracked in project management software and
the consequent quantity of reporting and data entry is crucial to “get
right”. Advanced LIGO took an approach where the detail carried by the
Project Management team was relatively low, and the subsystem leaders
carried more detailed schedules in a variety of approaches for interacting
and directing their teams. It seems that an ideal approach would be for a
single software package to be used that would allow direct entry by and
preparation of reports tuned for technical leaders, and where a summary
version would be transmitted to the Project Controls group by the software
package.
Training: The skills and activities required for interacting with the formal
project management system and the PC team do not come naturally to most
technical leaders. Adequate training at the outset of the Project is needed
to ensure success. Similarly, many project controls professionals are more
accustomed to working with industry technical teams, where the technical
leaders have extensive project controls experience, and where the projects
are more stable and the staff less “one-of-a-kind” in abilities. Orientation
and training in this sense is needed for the PC folk.
Effort required: The time, goodwill and intellectual effort on the part
of the technical leaders required to perform their project management
responsibilities is significant. A sober assessment of the technical and
management burdens is crucial and additional staff in the subsystem to meet
the requirements may well be needed.
Feedback: It is a delicate matter to establish a sense of utility in the financial
and schedule reporting, especially for physicists who do not have previous
experience in the role of reporting progress. It is (of course) easy to deliver
information without much meaning when asked for progress, and it can
be very difficult for the project controls team to independently judge the
accuracy of the information. In fact, it is inappropriate that they should try.
Technical leaders are much more likely to provide useful information if they
feel they can get useful information back from the effort, and the project
management team must strive to make this so.
24.8.2 Project management mechanisms

A variety of mechanisms were important to Advanced LIGO’s management

to ensure that (1) we had insights into what was working and what was not,
(2) we had structured means to move the Project through decision-making
processes, and (3) we could communicate our status to our peers and funding
agencies, at the required level of detail and with interfaces they considered
appropriate.
This led us to the following package of elements:
The use of earned value: It was a requirement from the NSF that we use
an “earned value” system to report progress. In this approach, a plan is
laid out with anticipated funds required to meet goals; those funds may be
in the form of a salary or procurements. All technical goals can then be
evaluated in terms of the cost required to achieve them. Then, technical
managers evaluated their progress in terms of the budgeted cost of work
planned to have been achieved by a certain date (evaluated monthly) of work
performed and other similar measures. This allows a variance — positive if
ahead, negative if behind — to be calculated, in dollars, for both the cost
and the schedule to date. Interpolation is used, with engineering judgement
used to evaluate progress within longer intervals. This technique can allow
difficulties in the program to be identified and addressed.
External advisory panels: Advanced LIGO benefited from two peer panels
assembled by the Laboratory: the LIGO Program Advisory Committee
(PAC) and the Advanced LIGO Project Advisory Panel (PAP). These
panels were charged to evaluate progress and provide candid advice to the
Laboratory on the Project’s status and to the Project on specific issues
of concern. The Advanced LIGO PAP meetings in particular were behind
closed doors and this panel provided invaluable advice. NSF Peer Reviews,
held twice yearly, also helped to provide valuable feedback. A maxim of the
LIGO Laboratory Executive Director for much of the duration of the project
is that preparing for reviews provides most of the benefit; this is particularly
true when all the energy can go into providing a detailed description of
difficulties and quandaries with no sugar coating.
680 D. H. Shoemaker
Risk register and process: The objective of the Advanced LIGO risk man-
agement plan was to provide a simple, organized and systematic, decision-
making process that allows the team to focus attention and resources on
the possible events that will have the greatest likelihood of occurring,
and the greatest impact should one occur. It is forward looking, so that
uncertainties can be identified and managed before impacts are realized.

The risk management process began with the identification of risks and
generated a comprehensive list of potential project risk events. Project
risks are analyzed by considering their likelihood or probability of occurring

together with the consequence to one of the four project objectives: cost,
schedule, scope or technical performance baselines. A risk assessment matrix
of likelihood versus consequence provides a qualitative scoring of an event
as a high, medium or low project risk.
A list of risks to the Project was assembled at the start and was given
monthly reviews and roughly quarterly thorough updates. This spreadsheet
had columns indicating the nature of the risk, the cost and schedule impact
foreseen should the risk be realized, completed (with planned mitigation of
the risk) and an estimate of the cost and schedule risk at any given time
(accounting for the mitigation effort). Ideally, this list would correspond
closely to the potential calls on contingency (see below), although the fidelity
was variable in Advanced LIGO. It was, however, a valuable means to keep
risks in mind and to promote pro-active mitigation.
24.8.3 Contingency in schedule, cost

Advanced LIGO used standard contingency practices. When the initial
estimates for the cost of the Project were made, estimates were also made of
the likelihood and scale of cost contingency for each individual subsystem (or
significant subsystem activity). These estimates were made using a mixture
of engineering judgement and management input. A Monte Carlo process
was then applied to look at likely combinations of needs for contingency.
In this way, an overall estimate of contingency was generated and included
in the Project funding request. The contingency was held by the Project
management and disbursed upon need, as described below.
Financial and schedule change control: Standard procedures were followed to
maintain a structured approach to the movement of funds and modifications
of schedules with respect to the baseline plan. Funds were moved between
subsystems, and both to and from the contingency fund. If a threshold of
cost or schedule was exceeded, the request for change would be documented,
reviewed by peers and by the project’s management, and also by the NSF if
the amount exceeded a higher threshold given in the Cooperative Agreement

between LIGO and the NSF. This ensured that all parties were aware of the
change and could raise issues in a timely way.
Technical change control: The LIGO Laboratory configuration management
process was implemented to ensure coordination of changes and to assure
that the technical, cost and schedule impact of changes are considered. All
requests against baseline technical parameters, configuration and interface
documents went to the System Engineer for review. If the change was
potentially significant, the Systems Engineer would convene the Advanced
LIGO Technical Review Board, with the group membership determined by
the question at hand.
24.8.4 Safety
The formal, structured approach to safety found in projects like Advanced
LIGO is often bewildering to those who have previously worked in tabletop
environments and with just a few colleagues. The fact that it is the
management group that imposes these rules and regulations on scientific
and technical staff tends to result in friction and difficulty in maintain-
ing a more general positive environment for interactions between these
groups. The need for greater safety formality comes from a collection of
factors: the fact that heavy lifting and similar construction-grade activity is
routine and taking place in spaces where other more traditional research
activities are present, that a range of risks (solvents, electrical hazards
including high voltage, powerful lasers of a variety of wavelengths, heavy
lifting and work at heights) are often simultaneously present, that a large
number of people of various skill and experience were involved, and that
Caltech/MIT, and state and federal safety rules needed to be known and
incorporated. The management team is inspired to try to create a safe
workplace, because of the most obvious and important reason: they don’t
want anyone to get hurt and thus naturally tend to err on the side of
caution.
Fortunately Advanced LIGO was able, given the regulatory environment
of the NSF and Caltech/MIT, to define (and defend, of course, to our
workforce, the NSF and Caltech/MIT) a safety program that made a very
conscious effort to minimize bureaucratic issues and lost time to safety
formalities without compromising on the actual safety of the workplace.
Professional safety staff specifically for the project were engaged and then
placed with technical teams to get jobs done, and procedures were iterated
to get the right solution to problems.
682 D. H. Shoemaker
The key elements of the plan were:
• A formal written Hazard Analysis for all activities judged by the man-
agement team and safety officers to need one, signed by authors, safety
officers and management;
• A walkthrough of activities and associated hazards with the work teams,
immediately before commencing work;

• A “Stop Work” policy that enabled and encouraged anyone at any one
time to stop all work on an effort, with the intent to either prevent an
accident or to communicate a concern or better idea on how to proceed.
This policy had a range of responses to a Stop Work order — it was
possible to immediately return to work if the team and team leader felt
that the problem was resolved. For more serious problems, all work was
stopped until a formal analysis was completed, mitigation designed and
implemented, and the Stop Work order lifted by the project leadership;
• Safety meetings to discuss general safety and new risks on site were held;
seminars on, e.g., electrical and laser safety made the rounds to the four
Laboratory sites;
• Incorporation of Lessons Learned from accidents to all activities where
changes could improve safety;
• A “Good Catch” policy to encourage people to notice, report and address
either specific problems (e.g., a frayed electrical cord) or a change in
process (e.g., a better means to transport a heavy object);
• Every effort was made to minimize blame and to simply move forward in
case of an accident due to an individual’s mistake.
24.9 Communication beyond the project

There were a range of parties interested in hearing about the state of
the Project. For the sponsor, there are pre-defined obligations, which for
Advanced LIGO included:
• Weekly telecons
• Monthly, quarterly and yearly written reports
• Bi-yearly peer reviews
The reviews in particular were demanding in preparation for the entire

team, but also gave a chance for internal assessment. We shared with the
NSF and reviewers our difficulties and concerns, which in turn allowed the
project to best profit from the expertise of our peer reviewers and to best
set NSF’s expectations for the project.
The Advanced LIGO Project also gave regular updates to internal

Laboratory groups, as well as to the LIGO Scientific Collaboration; these
communications were important in helping craft large-scale plans for
observing, setting expectations for the rate at which the instruments could
be brought to astrophysical sensitivity, communicating best estimates for
sensitivity curves, and the like.

Advanced LIGO frequently received invitations for presentations at
scientific meetings. Care was taken not to “oversell” the rate of progress
or the expectation of sensitivity, while communicating the enthusiasm and

optimism of the overall team.
24.10 Decisions
There were several points during Advanced LIGO when difficult decisions
were needed on the path forward. Some of the decisions were purely technical,
while others were about making choices where both technical feasibility
and the availability of staff to carry out the task needed consideration. Yet
others were where planning needed to change to accommodate the realities
of slow progress, vendor delays or shortcomings, etc., and such changes led
to significant commitments of contingency funds.
In all of these, the Project needed, received and mostly followed advice to
not delay decisions — there is a tendency to want to collect more data to be
really sure that a change in direction is warranted and that the right direction
has been found; it is also often painful either to make the commitment of
funds or to deal with the sociological consequences of decisions. Perhaps the
most obvious example for Advanced LIGO was in the use of contingency
funds to increase staffing. While the estimates of cost for equipment were
often either accurate or generous, the starting estimates of labor were broadly
too low by a significant factor. This became apparent relatively early in
the project and incremental increases in staffing were made. In hindsight,
a bolder plan to supplement staff would have allowed the project to move
forward more quickly and with fewer detours to address staff shortages and
delays in isolated subsystems. Indeed, the advice the project received early
on and often enough was to make these larger additions to staff; it could
have been more enthusiastically adopted to our profit.
24.11 Conclusions
The Advanced LIGO Project successfully delivered instruments that met the
top-level goal of enabling the start of gravitational-wave astronomy. At the
684 D. H. Shoemaker
time of writing, work is underway to further commission these instruments,

addressing shortcomings in the design, and introducing new elements such as
ground tilt sensors and the use of squeezed light. A+, an incremental-scale
upgrade, is in planning and proposal stages. We hope that both the technical
basis and the experience from the Advanced LIGO detectors will prove to
be useful as the field moves into the future.
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Planning, Managing and Executing The Design and Construction of Advanced LIGO

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March 8, 2019 7:52 Advanced Interferometric Gravitational-Wave Detectors 9.61in x 6.

69in b3434-v2-ch24 page 655

Planning, managing and executing

the design and construction

24.2 The start of the project planning process

compatible with more sensitive instruments. In parallel with the instrument

• Astrophysics within reach of concepts: The next detector had to have a

high probability of detecting GWs;

that, through both prototype measurements and well-based modeling,

In August 2002, the discussion in the LIGO Laboratory and the

24.2.2 Alternatives to large projects

• Breaking down a signiﬁcant change into smaller upgrades can allow a

• It enables interleaving downtime for instruments around the world for

After considering these questions, we chose to make a very complete

24.3 Setting up the project

• Natural technical domains, reﬂecting easy-to-deﬁne electrical, mechanical

• Facility Modiﬁcation and Preparation, which encompasses modiﬁcations

servo-controls infrastructure modiﬁcations for the Advanced LIGO inter-

analysis systems and computational infrastructure needed to support the

• Integration. The scope of the work of the Integration activity (IN)

To gather similar technical challenges and manage large groups, we

included both Interferometer Sensing and Control as well as Data Acqui-

through to create a more detailed engineering design, it became clear that

these activities as individual subsystems, but in generally, a consistent level

24.3.1 Refining the concept and the project

then assembled into a “Project Book”,4 which gave a top-level description of

started to look at what could be accomplished with an instrument of

process of developing requirements, conceptual designs, preliminary designs

24.4 Proposing for funding

In the Project, three interferometers were proposed, with two to be

24.5 Forming the project team

to the execution of the Project. The characteristics of the teams can be

the procurement, processing, assembly, subsystem scheduling and reporting,

on Initial LIGO, or had been previously co-located. However, it is certain

or the Project. Thus, formally speaking, it was possible for supervisors to

24.6 Documentation and communication

• Project Execution Plan [Shoemaker et al. (2013)]: This is the key

naı̈veté and ambitions are high.

More broadly, the Advanced LIGO documentation is available to the

24.6.2 Documentation tools

Document Control Center or DCC 9 : A document archive and search

collections of documents in “events”. Document trees can be created through

primarily in a custom-built Java-based system (ICS — Inventory Control

24.6.3 Communication tools

• Voice: Criteria for a voice communication tool include quality of sound

• Email: Electronic mail was, of course, intensively used to coordinate,

• A weekly meeting consisting of the leaders of subsystems, key Project

• The leadership group spoke twice weekly on a mixture of project manage-

This rhythm of meetings often felt burdensome and some evolution

24.7 Systems Group

modeling, raytracing and integration of multiple models of systems to allow

contamination. Particulates on optics can cause scattered light (both a loss

particular for parts containing (acceptable) polymers, were extremely time-

• Extensive prototype testing in the conceptual design phase,

• Testing of parts and sub-assemblies of production units,

using full-scale LIGO vacuum chambers, electronic interfaces (and cable

24.7.3 Configuration control and the technical review board

Once a technical baseline change was approved, the impact on design,

24.7.4 Quality control

• Establish QA/QC procedures and processes and to document them;

This notion of “embedded” QC oﬃcers carries some risk of ownership of

24.7.5 Fault recording

“actionable” form, assigned to an individual, and then reviewed on a weekly