This project will focus on improving nuclear power plant availability by employing an expert system-based Plant Operations Management System (POMS) to provide guidance to the operators of the plant. With this system both the individual components and the plant remain in the regime of safe operation, minimizing inadvertent trips and facilitating diagnosis of trips that do occur. The primary focus is to develop a system that is both living and learning; that is, it must be easily upgradable and must allow for a testing process that will enable learning. The system will have both the capacity to provide trip avoidance information and post-trip, post-incident evaluation using an identical knowledge base, thereby providing a strong and active feedback mechanism to enable the growth of the system. The Logic Flowgraph Method, created in an object-oriented environment, will perform the knowledge representation function of the physical system. The logic employed in the reasoning process will be function dependent, either trip avoidance, scenario evaluation, or trip diagnostic, and will utilize some combination of deductive, inductive, abductive, evidential, and model-based reasoning. In total, the capabilities implicit in the system should be of major benefit to plant operations. Phase I successfully defined a workable framework for the expert system structure outlined above and also successfully tested fundamental portions of the modeling and diagnostic tools to be implemented in POMS using existing records of an actual plant trip transient. These records were provided by engineering personnel at the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District's Rancho Seco PWR Plant. Phase II will follow testing and evaluation at utilities with a comprehensive commercialization plan to put this technology in the hands of U.S. power plant operators.Anticipated Results/Potential Commercial Applications as described by the awarded It is intended to develop a comprehensive prototype in Phase II. The ultimate POMS should be operable on personal computers based on the Intel 80386 processor, such as the IBM System 80 or Compaq 386, which will be in general use by the conclusion of this project. The finished version of this system should be very cost competitive when used in this environment. There will be two waves of users: the primary set is nuclear power plant owner/operators, and the secondary set is any process system characterized as having shutdown trips and economic loss due to lost availability.Topic 16: Computer Applications to Nuclear PowerPlants
