UKAEA RACE - RAICo Request for Expressions of Interest - Data Exploitation

Tender description

UKAEA RACE - RAICo are investigating the creation of an enhanced suite of tools for merging and utilising data collected by robot/sensor from hazardous nuclear decommissioning site locations. Improving the reliability, repeatability, and breadth of supporting data to enable faster, safer, and cheaper decision making for decommissioning and maintenance applications. It seeks to do this by engaging with industry and academia to combine recent advances from other fields, to develop a data exploitation framework focused on a unified data format suitable for nuclear decommissioning. Lot 1: Nuclear Building Information Modelling (BIM) Development and demonstration of a nuclear BIM suitable for supporting nuclear fusion and fission decommissioning. This shall include importing existing CAD, connecting related textual records, maintenance logs, and capture data from inspection robots and sensors. The nuclear BIM shall include the ability to include radiological and contamination data. Beyond this, it shall also include the ability to include uncertain or incomplete data. We will be seeking expertise in all digital related technology skill sets and capabilities to support the development of a nuclear BIM. Lot 2: Decommissioning Data Viewer This project will develop an intuitive interface to the Nuclear BIM, allowing multiple types of users to inspect a plant, and easily interact with the data that they require (e.g. overlaying radiological data). This shall include VR representations for the 3D data. We will be seeking expertise in all digital related technology skill sets and capabilities. Lot 3: Automated Inspection This project shall focus on routinely and autonomously exploring and inspecting large complex regions enabling this in nuclear decommissioning and ensuring that the data is returned in a standard format suitable for the nuclear BIM. We will be seeking expertise in all digital / inspection related technology skill sets and capabilities. Lot 4: Remote Health Physics For most decommissioning operations, multiple radiological protection workers are required to be on standby in uncomfortable PPE for the entire period of an operation. This can cause delays and puts additional people at risk. With the advent of readily available mobile robotics, it should be possible to deploy remote platforms to complete some of the monitoring tasks remotely. This project focuses on the development and in-field testing of remote health physics techniques. We will be seeking expertise in all digital technology / health physics related skill sets and capabilities.