• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제55권12호
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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.

• 융합보안논문지
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• 제12권2호
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• pp.61-70
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• 2012

본 연구의 목적은 효율적인 기계경비시스템 오경보 이벤트 분석을 위해 가장 적합한 데이터마이닝 기법을 도출하는데 있다. 이를 위해 기계경비시스템 오경보의 발생원인을 살펴보고, 오경보 시의 출동건수, 오경보율 그리고 오경보원인의 통계자료를 토대로한 데이터를 데이터마이닝 프로그램인 WEKA에 맞게 변환시켜 여러 알고리즘에 적용 및 분석하였다. 본 논문에서는 적합한 데이터마이닝 기법을 찾기 위해 Decision Tree, Naive Bayes, BayesNet Apriori, J48Tree 알고리즘을 활용하였고, 분석을 통해 생성된 가장 높은 값을 도출하여 해당 알고리즘의 적용 가능성을 확인하였다. 이와 같은 연구를 통해 효율적으로 기계경비시스템의 오경보를 예측하고, 오경보에 대한 보다 효율적인 대처방안을 모색할 수 있음을 보여주었다.

• 대한인간공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한인간공학회 1997년도 추계학술대회논문집
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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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• 제50권5호
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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.

• 한국생산제조학회지
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• 제21권2호
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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.

• 전기학회논문지
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• 제60권10호
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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.

• 한국안전학회지
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• 제37권2호
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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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• 제4권2호
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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.

• 한국화재소방학회논문지
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• 제17권3호
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• pp.26-30
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• 2003

본 논문은 화재발생시 열감지기가 오동작하는 특성을 열방출률(Heat Release Rate : HRR)을 이용하여 경계값을 정량적으로 나타내고 그 경계값을 기준으로 감지기의 오동작 영역을 분석하였다. Crib 형태의 목재를 가지고 small-scale의 화재실험을 통하여 화재감지기의 동작시간 등을 측정하였고 이를 이용하여 화재감지기가 동작하는 순간의 HRR을 계산하였다. 화재실험으로부터 얻은 변수를 가지고 화재감지기가 오동작하는 HRR의 경계값을 계산한 결과 정온식 감지기는 20.24 kW 차동식 감지기는 13.59 kW로 나타났다.

• 한국안전학회지
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• 제8권1호
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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.