Canada’s National Nuclear Emergency Plan Strengthened with Customized Software System

Canada’s Federal Nuclear Emergency Plan (FNEP) was strengthened after the Radiation Protection Bureau of Health Canada worked with software developers to customize and implement the Accident Reporting and Guidance Operational System (ARGOS). Developed by the Prolog Development Center in Denmark, in cooperation with the Danish Emergency Management Agency, the ARGOS is a decision support software system that improves Canada’s ability to coordinate a timely and effective response to a nuclear or radiological emergency.

A Landscape of Information Silos

Widely used in Europe where nuclear emergency response plans are the responsibility of small groups of specialists, the ARGOS was customized to fit the requirements of Canada’s FNEP. The FNEP requires Health Canada to work with 14 federal departments and 6 federal agencies in response to a nuclear emergency. The difference between the two approaches, explains project manager Eric Pellerin of Health Canada, means that exchanging information in Canada’s larger and more unwieldy response system is difficult and time-consuming. "You have a very different profile in Europe, where information is distributed more freely. In Canada we have lots of what people call ‘data silos’ because we have huge organizations with big structures working on specific aspects of nuclear response. This means organizations hold key information that they are sometimes very reluctant to exchange and give out."

According to Mr. Pellerin, Canada had the capabilities to measure the data and perform the necessary calculations needed for managing a nuclear emergency, but they remained isolated from one another. "Everything was more or less disconnected. But in order to conduct a complete assessment of information during a nuclear emergency response and make sense of it all you need to put all of the information together," says Mr. Pellerin. To make the FNEP work as it should, Canada needed to be able to handle and integrate data, such as weather, geographic, and radiological information, coming from the different departments and sources.

ARGOS links to Health Canada's radiation detection network

The Great Integrator

Looking for a better way to integrate Canada’s diverse capabilities and data, Mr. Pellerin and his colleagues at the Radiation ProtectionBureau started investigating what other countries were doing to handle nuclear emergencies. They discovered the ARGOS through their involvement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The ARGOS is a client-server database application based on Microsoft Windows NT technology that stores measurement data collected from a variety of disparate sources. "It was not exactly what we wanted, but it matched the response framework we were looking for through the FNEP," says Mr. Pellerin. Despite the need to modify the software system and its core applications, the team was convinced that the ability of the ARGOS to integrate data made it a must-have tool for the federal departments responsible for managing a nuclear emergency under the FNEP.

Mr. Pellerin and his team were studying the possibility of integrating and customizing some of the applications for Canadian use when CRTI extended its invitation for research supporting the management and control of a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CRBN) event. "With the help of CRTI, we managed to secure the funding and streamline the processes to allow us to heavily modify the system and applications and integrate these into our operations." Investing in the ARGOS also enabled Canada to join the ARGOS Consortium, a network of countries currently using any one of Prolog Development Center’s software applications providing decision support and monitoring of nuclear emergencies.

Better Plan, Better Relations

The project team enlisted the help of the Prolog Development Center and the Danish Emergency Management Agency, along with the FNEP partners, to fully customize and implement the ARGOS. The team is already participating in technical exercises with the international community to test its effectiveness. With the ARGOS integrating all the relevant data to handle a nuclear emergency, decision makers get an overview of the emergency, a prognosis of how the situation will evolve, analyses and visualizations of measurements, and decision support for countermeasures.

ARGOS visually locates trouble spot

Now an official part of the FNEP, the ARGOS enables Health Canada and its FNEP partners to rapidly coordinate an effective response to a radiological or nuclear emergency. An added benefit is that the ARGOS has improved the federal government’s relationships with other jurisdictions, especially with the provinces. Explains Mr. Pellerin: "There have always been little tensions between the federal and provincial governments, but when you suddenly arrive with a tool like the ARGOS the nature of that relationship changes. We have something to offer them, something that will drastically help with their emergency response. This has actually opened the door for better data exchange."

For a technical description of this project, see Technology Acceleration Project 0080TA.