AN APPLICATION OF AUTOMATED OPERATING PROCEDURE SYNTHESIS IN THE NUCLEAR INDUSTRY

The synthesis of operating procedures for the transient operation of c hemical processes is a formidable and expensive task during the design of a plant. It is time-consuming and error-prone both for the process engineering department to specify the procedures and for the automati on department to generate sequence control code from the specification s. A further source of error arises at the interface between the two d epartments since the boundary is typically ill-defined and engineers o f different backgrounds often make assumptions without adequate unders tanding of the other discipline. In this paper, we describe the applic ation of the CAPS (computer-aided procedure synthesis) system (Crooks et al., 1992a,b,c) to a case study in the nuclear industry - British N uclear Fuels' (BNFL) Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP), which w ill be the largest facility in the world for reprocessing spent reacto r fuel pins. The case study considers the ''head end'' plant of THORP which involves reagent preparation and fuel pin dissolution and is a s ingle product batch and semi-continuous process. The CAPS system succe ssfully generated realistic supervisory procedures and control sequenc e specifications which were in close agreement with the actual control sequences developed by BNFL engineers. Furthermore, the modelling eff ort required as input to CAPS was reasonable and all of the informatio n was readily available early in the design life cycle.