Development of risk-based operation and maintenance management system for nuclear plants

Traditional approach in Decision-Making in nuclear plants & regulatory bodies is based on engineering judgment, O&M experience & technical specifications. However, this approach is conservative and at times tends to be arbitrary in nature. This is because these are prescript by the designers or regulators. So, no quantified inputs go to decision making criteria for plant management. The uncertainties associated with data or model is also not quantified. The state of art in “PSA-An analytical approach” enables to represent performance parameters in form of reliability and safety. This approach provides probabilistic, systematic, flexible and rational framework for optimization of parameters in decision making also gives integrated plant performance view for safety performance. The outcome of this approach is used for several applications in decision making. This paper discusses the development of risk-based operation and maintenance management system for nuclear plants / industries. This system is developed for the ease and effective decision making by the O&M agencies, considering risk contributed by each component and system. This tool is having user friendly GUI for plant operators with almost a all important elements for risk-based management such as CDF calculation, risk profile graph, system unavailability and IE contribution to CDF, importance analysis, uncertainty analysis, login sessions, compare risk-based surveillance test interval to traditional surveillance test interval, and scope for technical specifications, this system also facilitates the shutdown maintenance planning and scheduling. For validation and verification PSA model of research reactors is developed and system is implemented. And most of the results are comparable with professional software available in market. This paper underlies goal and acceptance criteria for judgment and correctness of data and model.