Experiences from an industry-wide initiative for setting metadata for regulatory requirements in the nuclear domain

The industrial organizations involved in developing and maintaining nuclear power plants need to comply with the requirements coming from the legislative regulation. In the newly renewed Finnish guidelines, there are over 6500 such requirements, which are not always easy to interpret. The industrial stakeholders particularly find the situation highly challenging. Therefore, the Finnish nuclear industry and regulators formed a joint task force to clarify the new requirements by attaching metadata to regulatory requirements. We observed the work process and created tooling to support this work. We present the initial results of the ongoing work of the task force at its halfway milestone, the KLAD tool and experiences on its usage. In the process of setting metadata, the industrial stakeholders reported increasing understanding of the content meaning of the requirements, and regulatory requirement authors learned about writing good requirements. The tool was successful, and in addition, it provides good opportunities for further analysis of the requirements and metadata.