Automated Rule-Base Control for Nuclear Power Plants

Efforts are underway to optimize the roles of man and machine in the control of liquid-metal-cooled fast breeder reactors. The work reported here describes: 1) a methodology for the decomposition of the control process into a hierarchical structure, 2) an explicit methodology, Sequencing Established States, to limit the state space search for process control and, 3) the Procedure Prompting System which demonstrates the use of the above methodologies for automatically generating instructions to provide guidance to an operator for both normal and off-normal plant conditions.