Development of advanced I&C in nuclear power plants: ADIOS and ASICS

In this paper Automatic Startup Intelligent Control System (ASICS) that aut omatically controls the PWR plant from cold shutdown to 5% of reactor power and Alarm and Diagnosis-Integrated Operator Support System (ADIOS) that is integrated with alarms, process values, and diagnostic information to an e xpert system focused on alarm processing are described. Nuclear Power Plant is manually controlled from cold shutdown to 5% according to the general o peration procedures for startup operation of nuclear power plant. Alarm inf ormation is the primary sources to detect abnormalities in nuclear power pl ants or other process plants. The conventional hardwired alarm systems, cha racterized by one sensor-one indicator may lead the control room operators to be confused with avalanching alarms during plant transients. ASICS and A DIOS are designed to reduce the operator burden. The advances in computer s oftware and hardware technology and also in information processing provide a good opportunity to improve the control systems and the annunciator syste ms of nuclear power plants or other similar process plants. It is very impo rtant to test and evaluate the performance and the function of the computer - or software-based systems like ASICS and ADIOS. The performance and the f unction of ASICS and ADIOS are evaluated with the real-time functional test facility and the results have shown that the developed systems are efficie nt and useful for operation and operator support. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.