Preventive maintenance has been widely used in many industries, including the power sector. So, to realize the reasonable and effective maintenance of nuclear power plants, it is essential to optimize the aging management from the viewpoints of both safety and efficiency. However, maintenance scheduling is currently manually handled, which is a time-consuming process because of the large number of components and constraints that must be taken into account when creating a schedule. Besides, there is plenty of room for improvement in the schedules because most of the maintenance requirements are manually checked. Our final objective is to develop and implement an automatic scheduling system using the mathematical technique of Operations Research for addressing the inspection-process-scheduling problem in a fast reactor plant. As a fundamental study, we proposed an inspection-process-scheduling model that minimizes the total number of inspections in a fast reactor while ensuring the reliability of the safety-critical functions. In this study, we formulated the inspection-process-scheduling problem as an integer programming problem. Computing the inspection-process schedules for a simplified fast reactor plant model, we managed to verify that the proposed model can provide the optimal schedule. The proposed model can make it possible to quantitatively evaluate the trade-off between the reliability of the safety-critical functions and the maintenance cost.


Optimal Scheduling of Inspection Process for Fast Reactor via Integer Programming

Division / Sponsors: 
Power Division & Nuclear Engineering Division (NED)

Power Conference
Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/POWER/POWER2020/volume/83747

International Conference on Nuclear Engineering
Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/ICONE/ICONE2020/volume/83761

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