CERN European Laboratory for Particle Physics

Exploring What Matters
Spanning France and Switzerland, CERN is home to the world’s largest particle physics laboratory and the Large Hadron Collider.  To accommodate the variety of equipment and the ever-changing roles of employees, CERN uses GIS to map and manage outdoor spaces, as well as the inside of buildings and offices in which assets are georeferenced.  Explore how the addition of indoor GIS helped build a community of teams that supports the daily operations on campus and is preparing the organization for future growth.

• Particle physics helps to bring answers to questions like what is unknown—95% of mass and energy—in our universe. CERN is the largest laboratory in the world studying this science.
• As part of a small team of GIS and geomatics engineers at CERN, Youri Robert and Nicolas Guilhaudin help to manage the collecting and surveying of data for the 220-hectacre campus. Like a small city, it includes more than 700 buildings with offices and office hotels, workshops and even a fire station.
• The CERN team has been using GIS for a long time to manage their operations outside. With a population of 15,000 scientists and students conducting research, they realized that GIS could also help them manage their indoor spaces.
• CERN built its own custom tools to visualize the office and building floor plans within the GIS. Seeing the value in providing a view of the office space by floor, the technical teams requested that the equipment they manage is represented on the plans as well. This started a snowball effect where several different groups began contributing to the application, adding more than 300,000 geolocated points to manage indoor space and assets.
• CERN has now standardized its indoor GIS data model across campus and with ArcGIS Indoors, they are able to find, assign and manage the campus office spaces. Using the wayfinding capability, the staff can understand the access needed to move from one location on campus to another.
• Indoor GIS is for more than simply office space. CERN is using GIS to manage assets underground where the particle accelerators are located, to ensure highly accurate alignment of the superconducting magnets, as well as foster collaboration between departments and share their work with the organization at large.