Operations Copilot: Procedure Generation

Generating startup, shutdown, recovery, and maintenance procedures from approved templates, twin state, and retrieved standing orders.

Procedures beyond the shot

Where a runbook covers a single scenario, procedures cover the standing operations of the machine: cool-down and warm-up of the superconducting magnets, vacuum conditioning, plasma-facing-component bake-out, fault recovery, and maintenance interventions. The Operations Copilot generates these from approved procedure templates bound to the current condition of the machine as reported by the twin and the Engineering Copilot.

Recovery procedures

Recovery procedures are the most safety-relevant class. After a disruption on the breeder or a potential collapse on the burner, the copilot generates the ordered recovery: verify hardware state, confirm quench-detection and dump-system integrity, re-establish vacuum and cryogenics, and re-enter the operating envelope from a known-safe state. The generated procedure defers to hardware interlocks and never proposes bypassing an interlock.

generate_procedure(kind, machine):
  tmpl  = rag.retrieve(kind, machine)   # approved template
  cond  = engineering_copilot.state(machine)
  steps = fill(tmpl, cond)
  assert no step bypasses an interlock       # hard rule
  mark side-effecting steps -> L4 + human
  return procedure(steps, cite=[tmpl, cond])

Machine-specific procedure families

• Breeder: magnet cool-down to base temperature, plasma startup, disruption recovery, tritium-system handling
• Burner: plug conditioning, ambipolar-potential establishment, DEC-train startup, potential-collapse recovery
• Both: cryogenic warm-up/cool-down, vacuum recovery, remote-handling maintenance sequences

Generated procedures are drafts for the responsible engineer to review and approve; they are never self-authored into standing orders. A procedure that would create or modify a persistent operating rule is explicitly out of the copilot's authority and is surfaced for human decision. All procedures are validated for consistency against the current approved procedure set before proposal, and are exercised against the twin during commissioning. See commissioning support and the evaluation harness.