• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.3
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• pp.825-836
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• 2019

One of the most challenging safety precautions for workers in dynamic, radioactive environments is avoiding radiation sources and sustaining low exposure. This paper presents a sampling-based algorithm, DL-RRT*, for minimum dose walk-path re-planning in radioactive environments, expedient for occupational workers in nuclear facilities to avoid unnecessary radiation exposure. The method combines the principle of random tree star ($RRT^*$) and $D^*$ Lite, and uses the expansion strength of grid search strategy from $D^*$ Lite to quickly find a high-quality initial path to accelerate convergence rate in $RRT^*$. The algorithm inherits probabilistic completeness and asymptotic optimality from $RRT^*$ to refine the existing paths continually by sampling the search-graph obtained from the grid search process. It can not only be applied to continuous cost spaces, but also make full use of the last planning information to avoid global re-planning, so as to improve the efficiency of path planning in frequently changing environments. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method was verified by simulating radiation field under varying obstacles and radioactive environments, and the results were compared with $RRT^*$ algorithm output.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.92-99
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• 2024

To minimize the cumulative radiation dose, various path-finding approaches for single agent have been proposed. However, for emergence situations such as nuclear power plant accident, these methods cannot be effectively utilized for evacuating a large number of workers because no multi-agent method is valid to conduct the mission. In this study, a novel algorithm for solving the multi-agent path-finding problem is proposed using the conflict-based search approach and the objective function redefined in terms of the cumulative radiation dose. The proposed method can find multi paths that all agents arrive at the destinations with reducing the overall radiation dose. To verify the proposed method, three problems were defined. In the single-agent problem, the objective function proposed in this study reduces the cumulative dose by 82% compared with that of the shortest distance algorithm in experiment environment of this study. It was also verified in the two multi-agent problems that multi paths with minimized the overall radiation dose, in which all agents can reach the destination without collision, can be found. The method proposed in this study will contribute to establishing evacuation plans for improving the safety of workers in radiation-related facilities.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Medical Physics Conference
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• 2002.09a
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• pp.119-120
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• 2002

The aim is to urge the need of elaborate commissioning of 3D RTP system from the firsthand experience. A 3D RTP system requires so much data such as beam data and patient data. Most data of radiation beam are directly transferred from a 3D dose scanning system, and some other data are input by editing. In the process inputting parameters and/or data, no error should occur. For RTP system using algorithm-bas ed-on beam-modeling, careless beam-data processing could also cause the treatment error. Beam data of 3 different qualities of photon from two linear accelerators, patient data and calculated results were commissioned. For PDD, the doses by Clarkson, convolution, superposition and fast superposition methods at 10 cm for 10${\times}$10 cm field, 100 cm SSD were compared with the measured. An error in the SCD for one quality was input by the service engineer. Whole SCD defined by a physicist is SAD plus d$\sub$max/, the value was just SAD. That resulted in increase of MU by 100${\times}$((1_d$\sub$max//SAD)$^2$-1)%. For 10${\times}$10 cm open field, 1 m SSD and at 10 cm depth in uniform medium of relative electron density (RED) 1, PDDs for 4 algorithms of dose calculation, Clarkson, convolution, superposition and fast-superposition, were compared with the measured. The calculated PDD were similar to the measured. For 10${\times}$10 cm open field, 1 m SSD and at 10 cm depth with 5 cm thick inhomogeneity of RED 0.2 under 2 cm thick RED 1 medium, PDDs for 4 algorithms were compared. PDDs ranged from 72.2% to 77.0% for 4 MV X-ray and from 90.9% to 95.6% for 6 MV X-ray. PDDs were of maximum for convolution and of minimum for superposition. For 15${\times}$15 cm symmetric wedged field, wedge factor was not constant for calculation mode, even though same geometry. The reason is that their wedge factor is considering beam hardness and ray path. Their definition requires their users to change the concept of wedge factor. RTP user should elaborately review beam data and calculation algorithm in commissioning.