A COMPARISON OF SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS TECHNIQUES

Modeling the movement and consequence of radioactive pollutants is cri tical for environmental protection and control of nuclear facilities. Sensitivity analysis is an integral part of model development and invo lves analytical examination of input parameters to aid in model valida tion and provide guidance for future research. Sensitivities of 21 inp ut parameters have been analyzed for a specific-activity tritium dose model using fourteen methods of parameter sensitivity analysis. This r eport demonstrates, for each sensitivity method, the required calculat ional effort, the sensitivity ranking of parameters, and the relative method performance. The sensitivity measures include the following: pa rtial derivatives, variation of inputs by 1 standard deviation (SD) an d by 20%, a sensitivity index, an importance index, a relative deviati on of the output distribution, a relative deviation ratio, partial ran k correlation coefficients, standardized regression coefficients, rank regression coefficients, the Smirnov test, the Cramer-von Mises test, the Mann-Whitney test, and the squared-ranks test.