Development of an Expert System (ESRCP) for Failure Diagnosis of Reactor Coolant Pumps

Abstract

This paper presents a prototype expert system (ESRCP) for Reactor Coolant Pumps. The purpose of this system is to diagnose RCP failures and to offer corrective operational guides to plant operators. The first symptoms for the diagnosis are the alarms which are related to the RCP domain. Alarm processing is required to find a primary causal alarm when multiple alarms occur. The system performs the alarm processing by rule-based deduction or priority factor operation. To diagnose the RCP failure, the system performs rule-based deduction or Bayesian inference. Various sensor readings are required as symptoms to infer a root cause. When the symptoms are insufficient or uncertain to diagnose accurately, Bayesian inference is performed.