Year
2000
Abstract
As a result of recent changes to the technical requirements of the IAEA safeguards equipment, a new set of INTRANET friendly safeguards instruments have been developed. Due to the ability of intranet compliant equipment to operate virtually anywhere with command, control and collect being totally separate and possibly in a different location, the development has been given the name of Virtual Instrument Platform (VIP). The interesting feature of the VIP development is that the equipment is fully TCP/IP compliant and in fact can be controlled using a standard Internet browser. The VIP instruments can be networked over standard Ethernet and phone line modem, with the provision for fully initialize and ignore autonomous operation in the event of network unavailability. Aside from the development of the instruments, a complete data collect and control support infrastructure has been developed which supports multiple instrument collect over local or wide area TCP/IP networks. The system has been tested over a global network with equipment located in Europe providing secure near real-time data into Canada. The Europe- Canada link has been carried out at an annual communication cost of less than $800/year as a result of the VIPs ability to perform autonomous dial out based data transfers. This remote access approach can be extended to real-time and batch data download from virtually anywhere in the world and can be deployed in very short time frames. Future development plans include the use of satellite based thin client connections to provide ubiquitous instrument status and event reporting as well as the use of wireless medium bandwidth connectivity for command and control in hard to access installations. All of these advantages have been possible by leveraging the wide scale commercial availability of TCP/IP based services and subsystems. This paper describes the details of the instrument as well as the data collect and control environment. The paper also provides details on the intercontinental test deployment of the system.