원자력 발전소 사고의 근사적인 베이지안 예측기법

An Approximation Method in Bayesian Prediction of Nuclear Power Plant Accidents

A nuclear power plant can be viewed as a large complex man-machine system where high system reliability is obtained by ensuring that sub-systems are designed to operate at a very high level of performance. The chance of severe accident involving at least partial core-melt is very low but once it happens the consequence is very catastrophic. The prediction of risk in low probability, high-risk incidents must be examined in the contest of general engineering knowledge and operational experience. Engineering knowledge forms part of the prior information that must be quantified and then updated by statistical evidence gathered from operational experience. Recently, Bayesian procedures have been used to estimate rate of accident and to predict future risks. The Bayesian procedure has advantages in that it efficiently incorporates experts opinions and, if properly applied, it adaptively updates the model parameters such as the rate or probability of accidents. But at the same time it has the disadvantages of computational complexity. The predictive distribution for the time to next incident can not always be expected to end up with a nice closed form even with conjugate priors. Thus we often encounter a numerical integration problem with high dimensions to obtain a predictive distribution, which is practically unsolvable for a model that involves many parameters. In order to circumvent this difficulty, we propose a method of approximation that essentially breaks down a problem involving many integrations into several repetitive steps so that each step involves only a small number of integrations.