The Next Generation Surveillance System

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Department of Safeguards will deploy a new generation surveillance system at facilities under safeguards starting in 2007/8. The new surveillance system, currently designated “the Next Generation Surveillance System (NGSS),” will replace the Agency’s DCM-14-based surveillance systems, which will have been in service for more than 10 years and must be retired due to the increasing difficulty of obtaining critical spare parts that are no longer in stock. The IAEA has devised a four-year plan to develop the NGSS. The first step in the plan was the development of a User Requirements document. The IAEA understands the value of identifying its surveillance needs systematically and documenting its conclusions logically so that they can be communicated clearly to the Technical Community. The Technical Community, working in close association with the IAEA, will design the NGSS based on the IAEA’s User Requirements. The IAEA developed the NGSS User Requirements using a systems requirements specification development process. This process, new to the IAEA, has produced a high quality product, reflecting the ideas and opinions of all project stakeholders. It will become the paradigm for developing other requirements documents for future systems. This paper will describe the NGSS User Requirements, including the development process and will provide examples of how the process was implemented.