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.
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.
Computer-based diagnostic monitoring to enhance the human-machine interface of complex processes
There is a growing interest in introducing an automated, on-line, diagnostic monitoring function into the human-machine interfaces (HMIs) or control rooms of complex process plants. The design of such a system should be properly integrated with other HMI systems in the control room, such as the alarms system or the Safety Parameter Display System (SPDS). This paper provides a conceptual foundation for the development of a Plant-wide Diagnostic Monitoring System (PDMS), along with functional requirements for the system and other advanced HMI systems. Insights are presented into the design of an efficient and robust PDMS, which were gained from a critical review of various methodologies developed in the nuclear power industry, the chemical process industry, and the space technological community.