Integrated Material Control and Accountability at Los Alamos National

The Integrated Nuclear Materials Information System (INMIS) project was initiated at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in 1999 to upgrade the existing material control and accountability (MC&A) system and to provide the capability of integrating with existing and future systems as needed. To accomplish this goal, an extensible Java/CORBA architecture was selected. This architecture allows for seamless integration with existing systems and provides distributed authentication, authorization, and application access, all in a thin client environment. A replacement of the existing nuclear material tracking and accounting functions was the first module developed. Although functional, business practices were limited in the old system by the archaic nature of the software environment. Requirements for the upgrade were gathered from MC&A experts and system users. This led to a close examination of MC&A driven business rules for the new system, many of which were not well documented in the older system. Lively discussions on the concept of an item, enforcement of need-to-know rules, and the relationship between nuclear material measurements and accountability values ensued.