Deployment of the Los Alamos Materials Control and Accountability System (LAMCAS)

Los Alamos National Laboratory, an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer, is operated by the Los Alamos National Security, LLC for the National Nuclear Security Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-ACS2-06NA2S396. By acceptance of this article, the publisher recognizes that the U.S. Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free license to publish or reproduce the published form of this contribution, or to allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes. Los Alamos National Laboratory requests that the publisher identify this article as work performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy. Los Alamos National Laboratory strongly supports academic freedom and a researcher's right to publish; as an institution, however, the Laboratory does not endorse the viewpoint of a publication or guarantee its technical correctness. The name LAMCAS “Los Alamos Materials Control and Accounting System” is derived from DOE application LANMAS with the necessary plug-ins for the LANL implementation. The purpose of LAMCAS is to be the system of record for the Materials Control and Accountability (MC&A) functions required by DOE/NNSA policy. LAMCAS replaces the Laboratory’s previous nuclear material accounting system known as the Material Accountability and Safeguards System (MASS). In addition to the LANMAS software supplied by the Savannah River Site (SRS) there are modules (plug-ins) written by either LANL or sub-contractor personnel. These include: Nuclear Materials Cost Accounting Module, Measurement Control Module, and Basic LANMAS Transactions (BLT) Module. The SRS quality assurance (QA) process allowed the LAMCAS implementation team to take a graded approach when testing LANMAS at LANL. The LAMCAS implementation team recognized that the LANMAS software although thoroughly tested, does execute differently based on the legacy data loaded into the database. The fact was taken into consideration when developing and executing LAMCAS test cases.