Creation of a Development Platform for Remote Maintenance Solutions in Fusion Power Plants

The technical viability of future fusion power plants is influenced by several factors, including whether they can be maintained through remote means. The plant design needs to be aligned with the capability of remote maintenance equipment, but determining this parameter requires labor-intensive analysis that draws from a wide variety of sources. Automating the analysis is vital for remote maintenance to evaluate more DEMO plant variants, consistently and in more detail, and to enable the work of other system designers. We build on work by previous groups to automate the process of determining maintainability. Our aim is to incorporate an assessment of feasibility. Typical examples of feasibility assessment include clash analysis of dexterous actions and collision detection for movements of large transport modules around the plant. Feasibility can also be affected indirectly. We explore how radiation models can be used to assess the impact of dose accumulation on downtime, i.e., the time needed to restore irradiated equipment using fresh spares. This work presents efforts to automate fast and consistent maintenance duration calculations through integration of space, radiation assessment, and systems engineering approaches. Ultimately, the work is intended to be part of a design verification and optimization toolkit to substantiate DEMO plant availability.