Defining and retrieving themes in nuclear regulations

Safety systems in nuclear industry must conform to an increasing set of regulatory requirements. These requirements are scattered throughout multiple documents expressing different levels of requirements or different kinds of requirements. Consequently, when licensees want to extract the set of regulations related to a specific concern, they lack explicit traces between all regulation documents and mostly get lost while attempting to compare two different regulatory corpora. This paper presents the regulatory landscape in the context of digital Instrumentation and Command systems in nuclear power plants. To cope with this complexity, we define and discuss challenges toward an approach based on information retrieval techniques to first narrow the regulatory research space into themes and then assist the recovery of these traceability links.