• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.12
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• pp.4408-4425
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• 2023

Alarm flood due to abnormality propagation is the most difficult alarm overloading problem in nuclear power plants (NPPs). Root-cause analysis is suggested to help operators in understand emergency events and plant status. Multilevel Flow Modeling (MFM) has been extensively applied in alarm management by virtue of the capability of explaining causal dependencies among alarms. However, there has never been a technique that can identify the actual root cause for complex alarm situations. This paper presents an automated root-cause analysis system based on MFM. The causal reasoning algorithm is first applied to identify several possible root causes that can lead to massive alarms. A novel root-cause ranking algorithm can subsequently be used to isolate the most likely faults from the other root-cause candidates. The proposed method is validated on a pressurized water reactor (PWR) simulator at HAMMLAB. The results show that the actual root cause is accurately identified for every tested operating scenario. The automation of root-cause identification and ranking affords the opportunity of real-time alarm analysis. It is believed that the study can further improve the situation awareness of operators in the alarm flooding situation.

• Convergence Security Journal
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.61-70
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• 2012

The objective of this study is to achieve the most optimal data mining for effective analysis of false alarm event on mechanical security system. To perform this, this study searches the cause of false alarm and suggests the data conversion and analysis methods to apply to several algorithm of WEKA, which is a data mining program, based on statistical data for the number of case on movement by false alarm, false alarm rate and cause of false alarm. Analysis methods are used to estimate false alarm and set more effective reaction for false alarm by applying several algorithm. To use the suitable data for effective analysis of false alarm event on mechanical security analysis this study uses Decision Tree, Naive Bayes, BayesNet Apriori and J48Tree algorithm, and applies the algorithm by deducting the highest value.

• Proceedings of the ESK Conference
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• 1997.10a
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• pp.303-309
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• 1997

This study is carried out to investigate performance differences between two alarm presentation methods from the viewpoint of human factors and to provide items to be improved. One of the alarm display methods considered in this study displays alarm lists on VDT combined with hardwired alarm panels. The other method displays alarms on plant mimic diagrams of VDT. This alarm display method has other features for operator aid with which operator can get detailed information on the activated alarm in the mimic diagrams, and the capability for alarm processing such as alarm reduction and prioritization. To compare the twodisplay methods, a human factor experiment was performed with a plant simulator in the ITF(Integrated Test Fcility) that plant operators run for 4 event scenarios. During the experiment, physiological measurements, system and operator action log, and audio/video recordings were collected. Operators' subjective opinion was collected as well after the experiment. Time, error rate and situation awareness were major human factor criteria used for the comparison during the analysis stage of the experiment. No statistical significance was found in the results of our statistical comparison analysis. Several findings were identified, however, through the analysis of subjective opinions.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.50 no.5
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• pp.690-697
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• 2018

Criticality alarm systems (CASs) are mandatory in nuclear plants for prompt alarm in the event of any criticality incident. False criticality alarms are not desirable as they create a panic environment for radiation workers. The present article describes the design enhancement of the CAS at each stage and provides maximum availability, preventing false criticality alarms. The failure mode and effect analysis are carried out on each element of a CAS. Based on the analysis, additional hardware circuits are developed for early fault detection. Two different methods are developed, one method for channel loop functionality test and another method for dose alarm test using electronic transient pulse. The design enhancement made for the external systems that are integrated with a CAS includes the power supply, criticality evacuation hooter circuit, radiation data acquisition system along with selection of different soft alarm set points, and centralized electronic test facility. The CAS incorporating all improvements are assembled, installed, tested, and validated along with rigorous surveillance procedures in a nuclear plant for a period of 18,000 h.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Technology Engineers
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.221-224
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• 2012

This paper presents the strength safety of a hybrid alarm valve by a finite element analysis. The stress and strain of a conventional hybrid alarm valve are calculated for the given maximum test pressure of 2MPa. Especially, the FEM computed maximum stress of a conventional hybrid valve is only 18.6% of yield strength, 370MPa. This means that the conventional valve is designed with a thick thickness of a valve structure. But, new hybrid alarm valve model, which is developed by optimized design method in this study, shows more low level of 43% in maximum stress and strain compared with that of a conventional hybrid valve. These results may recommend the reduction of a weight and a dimension for an optimized hybrid alarm valve.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.60 no.10
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• pp.1804-1810
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• 2011

It is necessary to adopt some logical techniques and methods of alarm processing for a large complex plant such as nuclear power plants in order to present the occurred alarm messages properly and concisely. Among such alarm processing techniques, the alarm suppressing function is a strong tool to avoid alarm flooding during the sudden transients of plant output power such as turbine trips, reactor trips and other incidents. Unless any suppression or representation technologies are used in an alarm message listing system, it cannot provide quick assistance to plant operators or supervisors during plant upsets because too many alarm messages are presented in an alarm list window. This paper presents the key suppression methods and analysis processes developed for implementing a suppressed alarm message listing function of an integrated alarm system called LogACTs which has been applied to a CANDU nuclear power plant. A simulation testing of the suppressing function conducted with the real plant alarm message list data has demonstrated an effective performance of the developed logics with the high suppression rate.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.69-75
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• 2022

Fire-alarm systems are safety equipment that facilitate rapid evacuation and early suppression in case of fire. It is highly desirable that fire-alarm systems have low false-alarm rates and are thus reliable. Until now, researchers have attempted to improve detector performance by applying new technologies such as IoT. To this end, IoT-based fire-detection systems have been developed. However, due to scarcity of large-scale operational data, researchers have barely studied malfunctioning in fire-alarm systems or attempted to reduce false-alarm rates in these systems. In this study, we analyzed false-alarm rates of smoke/temperature detectors and unwanted fire-alarm signal patterns at K institution, where Korea's largest IoT-based fire-detection system operates. After analyzing the fire alarm occurrences at the institution for five years, we inferred that the IoT-based fire-detection system showed lower false-alarm rates compared to the automatic fire-detection equipment. We analyzed the detection pattern by dividing it into two parts: normal operation and unwanted fire alarms. When a specific signal pattern was filtered out, the false-alarm rate was reduced to 66.9% in the smoke detector and to 46.9% in the temperature detector.

• International Journal of Quality Innovation
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.65-72
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• 2003

This paper mainly studies to build control charts under different alarm rule. For different alarm rule, the control limit parameters of a control chart should be changed, then some kinds of control schemes under different alarm rule were compared and the methods of calculating ARL for different control schemes were given.

• Fire Science and Engineering
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.26-30
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• 2003

This paper presents a study on the analysis for false alarm of heat detector using HRR(Heat Release Rate). And it is represented to threshold value and domain of false alarm. The HRR threshold value of false alarm is calculated to use parameters obtained by small scale fire-experiment. The experiment is conducted to measure detector activation time and flame spread of wood cribs fire, etc. The results show that HRR threshold value of Fixed type detector is 20.24 kW and rate of rise type detector is 13.59 kW, respectively.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.6-12
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• 1993

Now it is reported that there are many companies and factories which confront to the problem of false alarm in Automatic Fire Detecting System (AFDS). Though an AFDS is a high-priced and very important device in detecting a fire. the problem degrades the reliability and utility, eventually faith. of the system. This is a research concerned about the problem of false alarm of fire detectors in an AFDS. Structure of detectors was modeled up as a general K out-of n system. and reliability characteristics including false alarm rate and missed alarm rate, are derived from it. For decision of an optimal structure of detectors. preliminary analysis on various criteria is accomplished. It is concluded that appropriate modification of a detector with plural sensors may increase the system reliability and decrease the false alarm rate.