Supporting nuclear safety culture assessment using Intelligent Decision System software

This paper illustrates how efficiency, effectiveness, consistency and reliability of nuclear safety culture assessment can be improved by the Intelligent Decision System (IDS) tool. It describes how IDS can be used as both a knowledge management and assessment supporting tool for nuclear safety culture assessment using the IAEA Safety Culture Assessment Review Team (SCART) guidelines. Once the assessment knowledge is built into IDS, the tool provides support at the data gathering stage by retrieving the right guidance at when and where it is needed so that the assessment can be made more efficiently, consistently and objectively. At the Discussion and closing stage of the assessment, the tool generates aggregated assessment results for both a team of and individual reviewers in text and graphical formats. The text report highlights the strengths and the areas for improvement, including advice on how to improve and examples of best practices in the areas. The various graphical interfaces and charts provide side by side comparisons, panoramic view of the strengths and weaknesses, trends and profiles of assessment outcomes made by different reviewers, for different organisations or for the same organisation at different time. Those outcomes give a speedy and accurate account of the review so that discussions and feedback can be made more productively and constructively.