Abstract:

Education and awareness capabilities are offered through similar technological solutions and provisioning models, facilitating an integrated approach of learning, equally covering traditional programs, personal enrichment and public information. This paper describes the experience within a research project concerning early warning and decision support related to territorial vulnerabilities induced by nuclear facilities. The software developed predicts the propagation of radioactive particles in respect with the meteorological conditions, performs risk assessment and gives recommendations to three types of stakeholders: the large public, research and higher education actors, and decision authorities.

The development process model adopted within the research project was the evolutionary prototype, in order to obtain an early feedback from potential users, based on the existence of an initial implementation. The prototype was realized within a research institute specialized in nuclear physics and engineering; it includes a series of algorithms, mathematical models and decision rules with a multidisciplinary foundation. This prototype was used not only for evaluation and specification of future requirements, but it was effectively transferred to a software company for being transformed into a product with a higher technology readiness. The prototype evaluation was also performed within a technical university, based on three testing suites. One of them took into account functional requirements and software quality criteria; the other two were organized as acceptance tests for the education and awareness capabilities, where an important role was played by students from the Power Engineering Faculty, most of them enrolled to a bachelor program specialized in nuclear energy, plus several Ph.D. students. Each suite contained three types of test cases - for information, simulation and nonfunctional properties - and produced three types of recommendations - for improving software usability, introducing new functionality and optimizing design.

Each test case was designed by specifying the following elements: name, identificator, type, actor, tested version, tested modules, description, premises, scenario, actions and data, expected results, notes. Multiple learning materials were elaborated and presented in the laboratory; nevertheless, there was also a large collection of informative capabilities within the prototype, which were used within the individual study. After executing the tests the students filled in feedback forms where they described the results, reported bugs and suggested perfective changes. The documents were interpreted by the three testing monitors assigned to those tasks, and well-structured recommendations were formulated, indicating whether they are meant for awareness, research and higher education, or for emergency situations personnel.

The experience showed that the prototype developed within the research institute was also appropriate for specialized use of undergraduate students in the third and fourth years of study, as well as for research activities of Ph.D. students. The user interface and the embedded scenarios were verified in detail and the simulation capabilities allowed an interactive learning approach, conducting to a series of recommendations for the evolutionary prototype transformation within the software company.

Keywords:

Nuclear vulnerabilities, early warning, computer enhanced learning, links between education and research, experiences in undergraduate education.