Distributed Data and Information Fusion for Nuclear Reactor Condition Monitoring

An increasing number of civil nuclear reactors world wide are approaching, and have in many cases exceeded, their original design lives. In order to satisfy regulatory requirements and ensure that the reactors are safe to operate, whilst maximizing availability and ensuring economic viability, the volume of installed condition monitoring has increased significantly in recent years. Due to the age of many stations however, there is often the lack of a modern, integrated IT infrastructure with many, often overlapping, data sources of varying measurement types and sample rates. This paper describes a method for the distributed condition monitoring of nuclear reactors using intelligent software agents, which by means of a common ontology can autonomously collect and analyze data from multiple locations. The use of data and information fusion to derive more detailed condition monitoring results is shown to be a task well suited to agent based condition monitoring and a prototype system designed along these principles is described. Case studies are presented of the application of the prototype system to condition monitoring analysis of real data sets from nuclear reactors in the UK.