Consistency check algorithm for validation and re-diagnosis to improve the accuracy of abnormality diagnosis in nuclear power plants

The diagnosis of abnormalities in a nuclear power plant is essential to maintain power plant safety. When an abnormal event occurs, the operator diagnoses the event and selects the appropriate abnormal operating procedures and sub-procedures to implement the necessary measures. To support this, abnormality diagnosis systems using data-driven methods such as artificial neural networks and convolutional neural networks have been developed. However, data-driven models cannot always guarantee an accurate diagnosis because they cannot simulate all possible abnormal events. Therefore, abnormality diagnosis systems should be able to detect their own potential misdiagnosis. This paper proposes a rule-based diagnostic validation algorithm using a previously developed two-stage diagnosis model in abnormal situations. We analyzed the diagnostic results of the sub-procedure stage when the first diagnostic results were inaccurate and derived a rule to filter the inconsistent sub-procedure diagnostic results, which may be inaccurate diagnoses. In a case study, two abnormality diagnosis models were built using gated recurrent units and long short-term memory cells, and consistency checks on the diagnostic results from both models were performed to detect any inconsistencies. Based on this, a re-diagnosis was performed to select the label of the second-best value in the first diagnosis, after which the diagnosis accuracy increased. That is, the model proposed in this study made it possible to detect diagnostic failures by the developed consistency check of the sub-procedure diagnostic results. The consistency check process has the advantage that the operator can review the results and increase the diagnosis success rate by performing additional re-diagnoses. The developed model is expected to have increased applicability as an operator support system in terms of selecting the appropriate AOPs and sub-procedures with re-diagnosis, thereby further increasing abnormal event diagnostic accuracy.