NUCLEAR DETERRENCEEnhancing Preservation of Nuclear Deterrence System Designs
A new team at Sandia is helping to more consistently track why and when important changes are made during the design and development of nuclear deterrence systems. It takes an average of 10 years to develop a system from design to production. That means a lot of decisions and changes are made along the way.
A new team at Sandiais helping to more consistently track why and when important changes are made during the design and development of nuclear deterrence systems. It takes an average of 10 years to develop a system from design to production. That means a lot of decisions and changes are made along the way.
Amber Cantwell leads the nuclear deterrence configuration management team, formed in April 2022 to centralize resources and unify Sandia’s approach to configuration management, which is a critical system engineering process.
“Configuration management ensures that the design intent equates to the product we’re delivering. In simple terms, it’s a digital record book that explains why we made specific decisions and what those are,” Amber said. “It ensures that what you designed and what you built are identical and meet requirements.”
Storage of artifacts, such as technical decisions, pointers to test data, design information and safety records, is also a component of configuration management.
Optimizing configuration management
Configuration management has been used since the early days of developing nuclear deterrence systems, but that information was captured and stored in various ways. Now, Sandia’s new team is optimizing how configuration management is applied across modernization programs.
A centralized repository that supports real-time collaboration is one key to optimization. The other is consistent storage of digital artifacts that will be available through the lifetime of the system. The use of the repository and standardization of processes enable consistency across weapon programs.
“We have a more consolidated approach to how we’re managing information and keeping track of associated linkages as designs evolve,” Amber said. “As an example, if we identify an issue with a component, using the centralized repository, we could quickly identify which other systems are using that component. That in turn allows us to let the production agencies know more quickly what we’ve identified.”
Digital engineering ecosystem
The centralized repository and systems engineering processes will maintain traceability of a product’s design, requirements, qualification evidence and delivered configurations throughout its lifecycle.
The configuration management team contributes to the digital engineering ecosystem by helping create the framework for managing the design definition and tool support to help implement it and validate it with other partners.
The configuration management team has about 15 members. The team partners with others, such as design and weapon engineers, surveillance and sustainment teams and information managers to audit traceability of information, ensuring the full lifecycle of data is captured.
