Skip to main content
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Development of a First-of-a-Kind Deterministic Decision-Making Tool for Supervisory Control System

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1209214· OSTI ID:1209214

Decision-making is the process of identifying and choosing alternatives where each alternative offers a different approach or path to move from a given state or condition to a desired state or condition. The generation of consistent decisions requires that a structured, coherent process be defined, immediately leading to a decision-making framework. The overall objective of the generalized framework is for it to be adopted into an autonomous decision-making framework and tailored to specific requirements for various applications. In this context, automation is the use of computing resources to make decisions and implement a structured decision-making process with limited or no human intervention. The overriding goal of automation is to replace or supplement human decision makers with reconfigurable decision- making modules that can perform a given set of tasks reliably. Risk-informed decision making requires a probabilistic assessment of the likelihood of success given the status of the plant/systems and component health, and a deterministic assessment between plant operating parameters and reactor protection parameters to prevent unnecessary trips and challenges to plant safety systems. The implementation of the probabilistic portion of the decision-making engine of the proposed supervisory control system was detailed in previous milestone reports. Once the control options are identified and ranked based on the likelihood of success, the supervisory control system transmits the options to the deterministic portion of the platform. The deterministic multi-attribute decision-making framework uses variable sensor data (e.g., outlet temperature) and calculates where it is within the challenge state, its trajectory, and margin within the controllable domain using utility functions to evaluate current and projected plant state space for different control decisions. Metrics to be evaluated include stability, cost, time to complete (action), power level, etc. The integration of deterministic calculations using multi-physics analyses (i.e., neutronics, thermal, and thermal-hydraulics) and probabilistic safety calculations allows for the examination and quantification of margin recovery strategies. This also provides validation of the control options identified from the probabilistic assessment. Thus, the thermal-hydraulics analyses are used to validate the control options identified from the probabilistic assessment. Future work includes evaluating other possible metrics and computational efficiencies.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE)
DOE Contract Number:
AC05-00OR22725
OSTI ID:
1209214
Report Number(s):
ORNL/TM--2015/373; RC0423000; NERC014
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

Similar Records

Integrated Risk-Informed Decision-Making for an ALMR PRISM
Technical Report · Sun May 01 00:00:00 EDT 2016 · OSTI ID:1329123

Supervisory Control System for Multi-Modular Advanced Reactors
Technical Report · Tue Nov 01 00:00:00 EDT 2016 · OSTI ID:1615832

First-of-a-Kind Risk-Informed Digital Twin for Operational Decision Making
Journal Article · Wed May 14 00:00:00 EDT 2025 · Nuclear Science and Engineering · OSTI ID:2586968