Preserving Design Intent: Long-Term Digital Threads for Nuclear

Project summary

Meaning, not just data, across decades.

In any complex safety-critical system, it is challenging to understand how design intent and requirements trickle down into manufacturing, inspection, in-service and end-of-life decision making. Often called the "digital thread", this is particularly challenging when the expected service life of the product spans decades and multiple versions of the digital tools that enable the design.

The difficulty lies not just in technical issues with data formats, but in preserving the meaning of decisions: why a feature exists, why a tolerance was chosen, what assumptions were made. This is particularly difficult in nuclear contexts where configuration management and the control of changes is essential.

This project aims to understand why meaning gets lost in long-term digital threads, what information is necessary to preserve design intent, how open standards and semantics can preserve intent, and how traceability looks in practice within the nuclear sector.

Aims and objectives

Aim: develop a strategy and implementation of a semantic digital thread which preserves design intent and change management from design through manufacturing, inspection, service and end-of-life, supporting queries and auditing to enable regulatory compliance.

Objectives:

• Importance of preserving design intent: understand where meaning gets lost today, between software products and versions, and the real-world impact.
• Scope of preservation: determine what design intent and information is necessary for later maintenance, change management, end-of-life and audit.
• Standards and semantics: investigate how open standards, ontologies and knowledge graphs can preserve meaning across tool boundaries and time.
• Validation: identify KPIs and metrics for maintenance, change management and audits.
• Demonstration: show practical use of the system and experimentally verify the improvements.

Alignment to STAND-UP impact targets