Year
2015
Abstract
Transit matching is used by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in drawing safeguards conclusions, supporting inspection activities, and investigative analysis. It is considered in the State evaluation process, and the relevant issues are reported in the State Evaluation Report(s) and in the Safeguards Implementation Report. As a part of the IAEA safeguards information system, the IAEA has developed software to perform transit matching using a process called machine matching. For those transfers that cannot be matched by the software, human intervention is necessary, called human matching. In view of limited staff resources, it is clearly advantageous to have the software make as many matches as possible. Receivers are encouraged to report the shipper batch name in addition to the batch name they may use; however, this has varying levels of success. Currently, there is no requirement to include the container identifications (IDs). Being able to correlate reported batch names with a common container ID (e.g., cylinder ID) would add another factor for machine matching algorithms and thereby allow more matches to be resolved by machine matching. Therefore, this paper explores the concept of correlating cylinder IDs with batch numbers with the goal of increasing the efficiency and timeliness of IAEA transit matching.