A Multilevel Flow Models based Diagnosis Method for Multiple Faults in Nuclear Power Plant

Multiple fault diagnosis is a challenging problem, especially for complex high-risk systems such as nuclear power plants. Multilevel Flow Models (MFM) is a powerful tool for identifying functional failures of complex process systems composing of mass, energy and information flows. The method of fault diagnosis based on MFM is generally based on the assumption that only a single fault occurs, and based on this, the Depth First Search (DFS) is adopted to identify the abnormal functions at the lower level of an MFM. This paper presents a method based on Multilevel Flow Models (MFM) for diagnosing multiple functionally related and coupled faults. An MFM model is firstly transformed into a reasoning Causal Dependency Graph (CDG) model according to a group of alarm events. The CDG model is further decoupled to generate causal trees by a DFS algorithm, each of which represents an overall explanation of a cause of alarm events. The paper presents a comparative analysis of cases. It proves that the method proposed in the paper can give more comprehensive diagnostic results than the existing method.