Achieving resilience in critical infrastructures: A case study for a nuclear power plant cooling loop

Engineered systems are increasingly equipped with sensing and actuating equipment making the operation and supervisory task increasingly difficult to handle by means of human interaction alone. In particular, the detection, identification and accommodation of abnormal, potentially harmful, events has been a long-standing challenge. Many scientists in different scientific areas have attacked this problem which has resulted in a plethora of techniques for both Fault Detection and Identification (FDI) and advanced control, each with their strengths and weaknesses. Because of the diverse nature of adopted theory and paradigms and because of a historical separation of FDI specialists and control theoreticians, it remains a challenge to establish automated systems able to handle exceptional events with minimal human intervention. As such, a project has been set up to enable full integration of diverse FDI methods as well as optimal coupling of FDI modules and control modules in the closed-loop supervisory control system. In this contribution, we introduce the basic paradigms of our approach, a strategic plan to achieve this goal as well as some preliminary results.