A COMPARISON OF SOME ALGORITHMS FOR SAMPLE SIZE DETERMINATION IN INVENTORY VERIFICATION

This paper describes a new algorithm for deriving sampling plans for nuclear material inventory verification. The method is general in that it can be applied to a measurement system with any number of levels of measurement precision and with any measurement error correlation structure. It optimises the sample size at each precision level by taking account of the detection contribution of measurements at lower levels of precision. The algorithm is compared with other algorithms in terms of cost for different scenarios of inspector measurement error correlation structure. In particular it is compared with more traditional safeguards algorithms and with a dynamic programming optimisation approach. The results illustrate the degree to which there are potential economies to be made by using more sophisticated algorithms in inventory verification planning.