Some technological aspects of an evaluation and visualisation component for the safeguards integrated information system

According to Safeguards strengthening measures which include both Measures under Comprehensive Safeguards Agreements and Measures under Model Additional Protocol, the Agency receives much more information than some years before. It seems reasonable to develop an integrated information system (IIS) because information evaluation and review are important parts of Safeguards assessments. An integrated information system can include the following components: information search, primary messages selection, evaluation of received information, data storage, visualisation and evaluation of State's nuclear programme (SNP) and elaboration of management decisions. Hereby, IIS is a human-computer system where all components listed above are implemented. Within the framework of SNP a human factor plays an important role. SNP has a number of special properties such as uniqueness, multi-dimensions, subjectivity of its state evaluation, time variation, incompleteness of its description and the mentioned above human factor. For realistic simulation of SNP development it is necessary to reduce usage of quantitative methods and apply methods which are closer to perception of the outward things by a human being. This task requires to convert all available information, both qualitative and quantitative, into a special format. The format requires methods which are being developed on the basis of pragmatic, visual and Zadeh's linguistic variables which define corresponding scales. A pragmatic scale is defined on a basic metric scale taking into account a particular pragmatic cut of SNP. In other words pragmatic scale maps a pragmatic cut of the problem which is important from the point of view of IIS goal. By using pragmatic scales it is possible, for example, to estimate the speed of development of processes existing within the framework of SNP. The visual variable allows to solve the following engineering tasks: input of the expert's evaluations in the system and interpretations of its output results more effectively than a linguistic one. Moreover the complexity of algorithms which should be implemented in software decreases essentially. The visual variable, defined on the pragmatic scale, allows to develop graphical user interface which can be adjusted for a specific expert. The interface allows to input evaluations of an element of SNP on the basis of qualitative and quantitative information considering individual characteristics of an expert's perception. Information of different type (numerical, text, images etc.) is available to the Safeguards and an important task is to structure it the way which will help the Agency experts perform their assessments the best possible way. Safeguards IIS is oriented on a specific subject area - a State's nuclear programme. It means that Safeguards IIS should be in correspondence with recently developed 'a physical model' of the nuclear fuel cycle. The physical model contains refined knowledge about a potential State's nuclear programme. Because of quantitative and qualitative information has to be processed in IIS it becomes very important to elaborate an approach of their united processing. Linguistic descriptions can be used both in IIS input and in its output. Therefore in many cases it is difficult for the expert to express verbally a precise evaluation the state of the SNP element. For uniform representation of information the visual variable defined on the pragmatic scale jointly with Zadeh's linguistic variable and numerical basic variable are being used. The evaluations of SNP elements which are made by an expert according to available pieces of information contents are being evaluated in the system. Any piece of information which relates to SNP can affect the current evaluation of the particular element. The state of an element is being described by the expert with usage of program interface designed on the basis of the visual variable. The value of the visual variable is being changed by the IAEA expert depending on the content of the information received