A Design Methodology for Materials Control and Accounting Information Systems

Modern approaches to nuclear materials safeguards have significantly increased the data processing needs of safeguards information systems. Implementing these approaches will require developing efficient, cost-effective designs. Guided by database design research, we are developing a design methodology for distributed materials control and accounting (MC&A) information systems. The methodology considers four design parameters: network topology, allocation of data to nodes, high-level global processing strategy, and local file structures to optimize system performance. Characteristics of system performance that are optimized are response time for an operation, timeliness of data, validity of data, and reliability. The ultimate goal of the research is to develop a comprehensive computerized design tool specifically tailored to the design of MC&A systems.