Year
2017
Abstract
The intersection of the information age and a global increase in commercial nuclear fuel cycle activities has resulted in international nuclear safeguards inspectors being responsible for acting upon unprecedented amounts, and types, of data in the field. Recent proposals have described advanced information technologies to support in-field inspector activities, but have focused on development of conceptual or prototype systems or their deployment options rather than a systematic assessment of their potential added value. To better understand this void in the information system requirements for international safeguards, Sandia National Laboratories has undertaken a study of the interaction between safeguards inspectors and the information they use in the field. In this paper, we describe Sandia’s current work to evaluate a variety of information system constructs for simulated international safeguards activities. We describe the cognitive science foundations of the study, a safeguards task analysis used to prioritize activities for various modes of human performance testing, and the framework for the study’s experimental design.