Alarm Analysis for Nuclear Power Plant by a Functional Modeling Approach

Alarm cascades is one of the major problems of a main control room at nuclear power plant. This paper presents a functional modeling approach alarm analysis based on Multilevel Flow Models (MFM). The proposed alarm analysis method consists of an alarm propagation function to predict the state of a function that is not measured by sensors, an classification function to identify the consequential alarms from a number of alarm events. The consequential alarms can be further suppressed according to their priority and importance for reducing the number of alarm events which will be finally presented to operators.