Active Alarm Processing in a Nuclear Power Plant

An advanced alarm system (AAS) of a NPP (nuclear power plant) is primarily a digital system employing advanced alarm process logics and a VDU (visual display unit) based control and display for the alarms. The role of the AAS is to provide the information necessary to safely shutdown the reactor under all plant conditions, to monitor the plant parameters approaching or exceeding the operating limits and to minimize the number of alarms, and to group and prioritize the alarms. The secondary function of the alarm system is to serve as an alarm and event log. This paper proposes a new approach to an active alarm processing in a NPP by using active database and data mining techniques.