Overview of Identified Challenges in the Development Process of Superconducting Accelerator Magnets

Development challenges in the domain of superconducting magnets are concentrated on
technical problems in the current literature. Organizational, domain-specific challenges are often seen
as secondary but must be considered with new holistic development approaches like Model-Based
Systems Engineering (MBSE) becoming more popular. This work quantifies the domain challenges
and gives the foundation to derive success criteria for design support in the future. A systematic
literature review has been conducted to identify the overall domain challenges, and extensive
interviews in the CERN technology department have been carried out to identify the development
challenges on a practical level. Problems in knowledge management have been identified as a major
challenge in the development process and the general literature. The paper concludes by picking up
the most important challenges from the interviews and literature and puts them into the context of
the authors’ knowledge of electrical magnet design.