Year
2004
Abstract
Multi-Instrument Collect, MIC, is rapidly becoming the international standard for safeguard data collection. First implemented in 1998, it was adopted by the International Atomic Energy Agency the following year and fielded in numerous locations around the world. This application is capable of simultaneous collection from up to 100 independent instruments. It supports a variety of instrument types and a variety of communications media. Although created and currently being maintained by Los Alamos National Laboratory's Safeguards Science and Technology Group, N1, effort is underway (completion planned mid-year 2004) to open up the architecture promoting outside or third party development. This effort is nearly unique in the safeguards arena. It provides a standard user interface philosophy for a multiplicity of hardware vendors. User community advantages are: enhanced use-ability, decreased training, faster field implementation, decreased user data collection time, and ultimately lower implementation and maintenance costs. There are also significant advantages to the instrument developer. For example a variety of pre-existing communications objects may be used, pre-existing power management capabilities exist, and extensive data management capabilities. All of these may be leveraged into a vendors' development effort--significantly decreasing the amount of development effort and consequently decreasing cost, The presentation will include an overview of the existing MIC and MIC utilities from a developers and a users' point of view, the user interface philosophy, and will discuss the open architecture allowing third party development.