Case Studies: Department of Energy

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“The Department of Energy’s mission is to foster a secure and reliable energy system that is environmentally and economically sustainable, to be a responsible steward of the Nation’s nuclear weapons, to clean up our own facilities and to support continued United States leadership in science and technology.” DOE and NAC have teamed up to provide the Nuclear Materials Management & Safeguards System (NMMSS), which is an effective nuclear material accountancy system. The purpose of the system is to track the movement and inventory of nuclear materials within the United States, including imports and exports involving the U.S. NAC provides system operation, maintenance, development, and project management expertise for NMMSS.

The Problem

As technology continually makes advances, existing systems quickly become outdated and eventually become obsolete. NMMSS was steadily moving in this direction. The original system utilized a FoxPro for DOS database. It was becoming increasingly difficult for the system to meet the demands that were being placed upon it on a daily basis. The primary problems consisted of:

	The vendor no longer supported FoxPro for DOS
	The system could no longer meet the expanded needs of its end users
	The graphical user interface (GUI) had become out-dated and was not particularly user friendly

The Solution

To address the problems that NMMSS was facing, NAC recommended that the entire system be redesigned. The primary focus of the upgrade was to change the manner in which data was stored in the database and accessed from the database. To achieve this objective, NAC proposed that the current FoxPro database be upgraded to a sophisticated relational database management system (RDBMS) in the form of Oracle8i. This conversion moves the application from a client-server environment to a multi-tier server environment. Oracle Corporation touts the release of Oracle8i Enterprise Edition as, “…[a] powerful, reliable, secure data management for enterprise applications. Delivers all the tools and functionality to meet availability and scalability requirements of mission critical applications.”

To realize the augmented user requirements being placed on the system, the user was provided with the capability to customize reports on the fly. This extended functionality will dramatically increase the quality of data a user can receive directly from the system while limiting the number of special request reports that need to be generated by software engineers.

The GUI will be standardized to ensure continuity from each screen and ease in maintenance and future enhancements to the system. Additionally, the GUI will prove to be much more user friendly.

The Benefits

Upon the completion of the NMMSS upgrade, the investment in the system redesign will continually be substantiated. The transference of data to a RDBMS will increase the ease of system maintenance efforts, which will in turn ultimately decrease the cost associated with maintaining the system. Providing users with the capability to customize their data will also affect the costs associated with maintaining the system. The utilization of current technology places the system in a multi-tier environment that possesses multiple benefits. The system redesign affords the necessary flexibility to address future expansion requirements.