An Agent-based National Radioactive Waste Management Framework design

Radioactive waste management is now a much discussed public concern, especially at the moment with the Taiwanese government's impending announcement of a site for building a final disposal facility before the end of 2008. Despite there being a few software-based waste management systems independently developed within nuclear power plants and off-site interim radioactive waste facilities, much of the systems remain inconsistent, resulting in more manpower are needed to trace and analyze radioactive waste. Agent-based architecture offers a hierarchical structure to manage multi-individual and heterogeneous software environments. Ontology can play a major role in supporting the machine interpretable content, as XML provides a shared and exchange data among multi-agent environment. In this paper, we propose an Agent-based National Radioactive Waste Management Framework (AN-RWMF) that adopted the above technologies to enhance the efficiency of integration and machine to machine communication. We voluntarily use IAEA standards and are committed to meet the context of IAEA Joint Convention “On the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management” in the system requirements. Prototype application is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of framework design. It is anticipated that our AN-RWMF could be the potential solution for the Taiwanese radioactive waste information resource of national and international archives in the future.