MODELING OF NUCLEAR-PLANT SYSTEM INTERACTIONS, USING A LAYERED-DATA CONCEPT

Trends in the US Nuclear Power Industry require increasing levels of d etail in the documentation of proposed modifications to plant systems. One driving force for this trend is the recognition that changes in o ne system can easily impact many other systems. These ''System Interac tions'' can be very subtle, can have very dramatic influence on plant safety, and may be easily overlooked during a project's design phase. This paper proposes a concept for an expert system that will perform, in variable levels of detail, a review of system interactions. It expl ores methods of establishing the layered-data structure and developing a search strategy that is optimum for any given proposed plant modifi cation. Methods of testing the concept are also proposed.