Re-engineering IMIS, the German integrated system for measuring and assessing environmental radioactivity

This paper will first outline the tasks assigned to IMIS as laid down in several federal laws of the Federal Republic of Germany with an eye towards their realization, and then we discuss the technical aspects of reengineering IMIS. The requirements for the new version of IMIS are indicated, and we discuss how they should be implemented. It is surprising that before putting the new system into operation it was advantageous to introduce a prototyping phase. We will discuss the requirements leading us to the construction of a rather complex prototype. This prototype was operational and was subsequently evaluated, resulting in very specific recommendations for system construction which could not have been obtained from conceptual considerations only. We point out that these experiments were a crucial means of arriving at our recommendations. Hence we demonstrate a practical approach to system construction for rather large systems integrating networking, client/server architectures and carefully selected software components.