A SOFTWARE STRATEGY FOR UNATTENDED MONITORING SYSTEMS AT THE INTERNATIONAL ATOMIC ENERGY AGENCY

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) relies heavily on the use of unattended monitoring systems (UMS) to provide continuous monitoring of nuclear facilities around the world as part of its treaty-based mandate to assure that nuclear material in these facilities is not being diverted from peaceful uses. The primary overall goal for these systems is to never lose safeguards significant data. The growing reliance on UMS and the stringent data loss goal demands that these systems have high reliability through fault tolerant designs for both hardware and software. Also to be addressed is the more practical operational side of the software used by the IAEA in multiple hardware platforms, the interplay among world-wide vendors, the flexibility for upgrades and enhancements, the ease of implementation and configuration, and the training aspects. This paper will focus on the IAEA operational strategy for the software used in UMS. It will discuss the goals in the area of data collection, data review, software support, and background history of development, as well as the specific steps taken to meet those goals over the long term, the status of those steps, and current installations.