Configuration Management: Shared Challenges Within The Nuclear Energy And Aviation Industries

The development of effective configuration management processes and systems presents unique challenges for safe and efficient operations within nuclear facilities. Yet the nuclear energy industry is certainly not alone in this endeavor; many other industries such as commercial aviation also face similar challenges in developing successful programs to manage and maintain complex equipment and related processes in an atmosphere of rigorous regulatory oversight and public safety concerns.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) describes configuration management as "…the process of identifying and documenting the characteristics of a facility's structures, systems and components of a facility, and of ensuring that changes to these characteristics are properly developed, assessed, approved, issued, implemented, verified, recorded and incorporated into the facility documentation."

In aviation, configuration management is much more product-focused vs. facilityfocused, and relies upon the establishment of a "baseline" configuration as an agreedto description of the attributes of a product at a point in time, that then serves as a basis for defining changes.