A Reusable Framework for Monitoring/Inspection Information Systems

Monitoring and inspection systems are used in many areas from safeguards and security including terrorism detection to treaty verification. Although these applications have major similarities, each system is usually developed from scratch rather than through reuse of standard object types or components. Reuse allows developers to focus on the few differences, not the many common characteristics, of the new systems. The stimulus for this paper was seeing such commonality across materials management, safeguards, on-site inspections, and treaty monitoring applications. This paper describes a common information framework for monitoring and inspection systems. Frameworks have been developed for other application areas, but not yet for monitoring and inspection. A framework identifies the common objects, behaviors, relationships, and operations. Examples include: portals, which can be opened and closed; items (such as a container), which can be measured, observed, tagged, moved, opened, closed, and emptied; and devices, which can be turned on and off, triggered, take measurements, and calibrated. Key advantages of this framework approach are that it makes the systems more consistent for greater interoperability and easier and cheaper maintenance, as well as making their development and integration faster and cheaper. Architecture and design reuse is important because these parts of software development are more time-consuming and labor-intensive than the more frequently reused code generation. A common architecture would make it easier to reconfigure monitoring and inspection systems with different sensor sets optimized to specific requirements, ease the complexity of data fusion, and facilitate adding new sensors for system enhancement and life extension. Frameworks are more complex to develop initially than non-reusable systems because of their flexibility and extensibility, but their reuse results in significant time and costs savings. This paper identifies the problems a monitoring and inspection framework would address and the benefits it would provide. It explains the concept of a framework and identifies the types of objects and their relationships in a monitoring and inspection framework. It describes two scenarios to show the reuse. Finally, it identifies the next steps in developing such a framework.