On January 15, the third meeting of the Cost and Schedule Review Committee of the “NICA Complex” project, formed at JINR by the decision of the Committee of Plenipotentiaries of the governments of the JINR member states and the Supervisory Board of the “NICA Complex” Project was held, aimed at consulting the Supervisory Board and the Committee of Plenipotentiaries about the issues related to the evaluation of costs and efficiency of work on the “NICA Complex” project. The meeting of the Committee was held by F.Ferroni via video conference and was attended by all its members – Fernando Ferroni (INFN, Italy), Joachim Mnich (CERN), Lucia Cifarelli (University of Bologna, Italy), Frederic Bordrie (CERN), Lachezar Kostov (Nuclear Regulatory Agency, Bulgaria), Eliezer Rabinovici (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) and Leonid Kravchuk (INR RAS, Russia). On the JINR part, JINR Director G. V. Trubnikov, JINR Scientific Leader V. A. Matveev, Leader of the “NICA Complex” project V. D. Kekelidze, Co-leader of the “NICA Complex” topic A. S. Sorin, Deputy Head of the Project Directorate R. Lednický, JINR Vice-Director B. Yu. Sharkov, Head of the Project Office Yu. K. Potrebenikov, LHEP Deputy Directors A. V. Butenko and N. N. Agapov and Deputy Chief Engineer A. V. Dudarev participated in the open section of the meeting.

The Committee heard and discussed the report of the NICA Project Leader V. D. Kekelidze on the project status and the implementation of the recommendations made at the previous CSRC meeting in autumn 2020. Special attention in the report was paid to the results of fulfilment of the project implementation plans and the achievement of its milestones, to the assessments of the use of financial and human resources and plans for the development of tools for managing these resources, to the issues of dealing with the existing gaps in the implementation of individual elements and the project as a whole.

The Committee noted the outstanding progress of the NICA Project commissioning in the ongoing difficult situation of the COVID-19 global pandemic, in particular, the commissioning of the Booster, the installation of MPD magnet elements, the construction of a complex of power substations, and progress in the construction of a new cryogenic compressor station.

The Committee invited the management of the NICA project to prepare in the near future an updated project implementation schedule indicating the stages and their deadlines in order to be able to track the progress with a frequency of 3 months. It strongly recommended to prepare a document with a risk analysis for the most important elements of the project, to draw up a detailed list of the needs for qualified specialists with a description of the requirements to them.

The next meeting of the Committee was proposed to be held in September 2021.

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