On 5th and 6th February 2019 in Cardiff, UK, the LOFAR4SW Preliminary Design Review was conducted. Entering the 15th month of the project duration with great progress achieved and clear paths for further development defined, the time has come for a review by a selected group of specialists. The PDR Panel was provided with a variety of documents that were project deliverables describing the main scientific and technical goals. The basis for the all PDR documents were so-called ‘Science Use Cases’ developed at workshop in Meudon, France, in May 2018. The aim of them was to establish both, the scientific and technical requirements that should be taken into account in the preparation of LOFAR infrastructure for space weather purposes. The list of PDR documents is presented below.
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Science Requirements, based on the Science Use Cases. Each requirement has been given an identifier based on the Use Case it was drawn from. The Use Cases are organised into four categories Solar(S), Planetary(P), Heliospheric(H) and Ionospheric(I).
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System requirements document and upgrade scenarios, which contains the technical requirements for the LOFAR4SW upgrade. These requirements were derived from Science Use Cases and 1).
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Architectural Design Document, presenting an overview of the proposed observing modes to be carried out with an implemented LOFAR4SW system and initial design for this system.
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Verification Plan, describing integration, verification, validation and qualification plan for all project requirements and high level test planning for the LOFAR4SW project.
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Front-end subsystem studies, which summarises all relevant requirements to derive the required physical HBA elements.
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HBA physical architecture, describing investigation of analogue beam former and LNA architectures and technologies for a dual‐beam HBA.
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Subsystem studies, a review of the software subsystems required for the LOFAR4SW project.
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FR Hardware Requirements, reports on the hardware requirements for the Faraday Rotation observations and analysis envisaged in the LOFAR4SW project.
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Requirements for real-time simultaneous observations
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Preliminary internal governance model design, presents the draft governance model for LOFAR4SW, based on interactions with Space Weather service providers and researchers.
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LOFAR4SW risk sheet, identifying and analysing potential (future) events that may negatively impact the project realisation.
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Systems Engineering Management Plan, describes the system engineering tools used in the project.
The listed documents and extensive discussions with project leads for work packages and other team members during the meeting served as the basis for the review. The Panel described itself in a summarising report as being impressed with the quantity and quality of the work accomplished to date on what is a very interesting, challenging, and potentially transformative new suite of LOFAR capabilities. The comments and suggestions on specific issues presented by the Panel as a result of review were presented together with recommendations. This will be considered within the frame of the project and implemented as it moves forward toward its Critical Design Review.