Alarm Reduction Techniques in Nuclear Power Plants
Alarm management is one of the top ten technology challenges facing the process automation industry (InTech survey). Estimates indicate $ 20 billion has been lost to unplanned downtime-40% attributed to preventable human error. High alarm rates can necessitate additional operations staff and can also result in prolonged shutdown and start-up times. Nuclear Power Plant (NPP)operators face similar challenges. Alarm floods (i. e., 10 or more alarms within a 10-minute interval)can overload the operators abilities to manage alarm data and hence challenges the operators ability to respond to alarms in a timely yet safe manner. Industry guidelines recommend an average alarm rate of 144 alarms per day. Nuclear industry estimates indicate that a typical nuclear plant unit, with one reactor and turbine, may have 10 000 analogs and 10 000 contact (i.e., two-state signals), resulting in 20, 000 possible alarms. This paper presents three techniques:fault and status categorization, coalescing, and conditioning that can be used to reduce the number of alarms presented to the operator. The benefits of each technique, separately and combined, are investigated and discussed. Benchmarked results of applying these techniques, using representative alarm data from CANDU nuclear power plants, confirm it is possible to significantly reduce the number of alarms presented while still providing the operator with the information needed to safely operate the plant.
CANDU Alarm Annunciation Control Room DCC Flood NPP Operator Reduction
Basso Rick Chang-kue Karin Didsbury Rick
Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, Chalk River, Ontario K0J 1J0 Canada
国际会议
ISSNP2008、CSEPC、ISOFIC2008(第二届21世纪和谐核电系统国际会议、第四届电厂控制中认知系统工程方法国际会议暨第三届未来核电厂仪表与控制国际会议)
哈尔滨
英文
383-387
2008-09-08（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）