A real-time artificially intelligent monitoring system for nuclear power plants operators support

In this paper, we describe the artificially intelligent monitoring system (AIMS), a framework for power plants real-time monitoring systems (RT/MS), developed at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (COPPE/UFRJ) and applied to the Brazilians Angra-1 and Angra-2 nuclear power plants. The kernel of AIMS is an object-oriented knowledge-base system, in which acquired and calculated variables, as well as their interdependencies, are mapped into a hierarchical objects network where the rules and real-time constraints are implicit in objects operators and network topology. The state of monitored variables updates a fact-base, which is used by a real-time inference-machine (RT/IM) to activate and synchronize the fire of the knowledge-base (KB) rules. The operators man machine interface (MMI) are, then, updated. Besides, also following the object-oriented paradigm, AIMS provides many facilities for building and maintaining the KB and the operators MMI. In order to illustrate the use of AIMS, we show part of a real application in Angra-2 NPP.