Year
2002
Abstract
Information management is a key component of any monitoring and inspection regime. There are a number of significant challenges when considering how to structure the information management architecture for an upcoming materials disposition regime that include 1) many of the facilities may not yet be built and therefore details of available infrastructure, the types of information available, and what potential information may be lost are all unknown; 2) the front end of the disposition process may involve sensitive information, which must be protected from compromise; and 3) the information for making compliance assessment may come in a variety of forms including site activity and process logs, inspection reports, and sensor data from monitoring systems. Nonetheless, it is valuable to explore possible monitoring and inspection options as well as architectural options in order to better inform the negotiation process. Our approach to this problem was to develop a monitoring regime simulation. In this paper, we describe the initial version of this simulator, which includes a discrete event simulation of the disposition process and an initial set of monitoring system components, an information model describing the information to be collected during monitoring and inspection, a flexible generic data structure for storing the data that can be dynamically reconfigured to store and retrieve different sets of data, and a prototype user interface. The regime simulator makes it possible to explore different monitoring and inspection options before facilities are built and before final negotiations are complete. In addition, it provides information about data management and analysis requirements in advance of detailed monitoring and inspection regime design.