SOME COMPUTATIONAL IMPROVEMENTS IN-PROCESS SYSTEM RELIABILITY AND SAFETY ANALYSIS USING DYNAMIC METHODOLOGIES

An algorithmic approach is presented that leads to reduction in the co mputational requirements for process system dynamic reliability and sa fety analysis using discrete state transition models through the utili zation of vector processing and a sparse matrix technique. The new alg orithm is demonstrated on an example system taken from boiling water r eactors. The results show reduction in random access memory requiremen ts by a factor of 20 and reduction in the computational time by a fact or of 7 with respect to the original algorithm. (C) 1996 Elsevier Scie nce Limited.