An application on Alarm Root Cause Tracking system(ACTs)
In this paper, an operator-aid system is proposed for tracking the logics of alarm, finding out the causes of alarm, displaying the highlighted alarm procedure related to the causes, and suppressing and filtering nuisance alarms due to the physical or logical connections between components or systems in abnormal state. The system can be used for operator to identify the detail causes of an alarm without checking all of causes of candidates by alarms. The proposed system will apply to nuclear power plant on CANDU type, Wolsong 3&4 Nuclear Power Plant.
Computer-based Alarm Processing and Presentation Methods in Nuclear Power Plants
Computerized alarm systems have been applied increasingly to nuclear power plants. For existing plants, an add-on computer alarm system is often installed to the control rooms. Alarm avalanches during the plant transients are major problems with the alarm systems in nuclear power plants. Computerized alarm systems can process alarms to reduce the number of alarms during the plant transients. This paper describes various alarm processing methods, an alarm cause tracking function, and various alarm presentation schemes to show alarm information to the operators effectively which are considered during the development of several computerized alarm systems for Korean nuclear power plants and are found to be helpful to the operators. Keywords—Alarm processing, Alarm presentation, Alarm cause tracking, Alarm logic diagram computerization, Alarm pattern recognition.
Applying AI Techniques to Improve Alarm Display Effectiveness
The Alarm Filtering System (AFS) addresses the problem of information overload in a control room during abnormal operations. Since operators can miss vital information during these periods, systems which emphasize important messages are beneficial. AFS uses the artificial intelligence (AI) technique of object-oriented programming to filter and dynamically prioritize alarm messages. When an alarm’s status changes, AFS determines the relative importance of that change according to the current process state. AFS bases that relative importance on relationships the newly changed alarm has with other activated alarms. Evaluations of alarm importance take place without regard to the activation sequence of alarm signals. The United States Department of Energy has applied for a patent on the approach used in this software. The approach was originally developed by EG&G Idaho for a nuclear reactor control room.