A transformational approach applied to outage management of nuclear power plants

We report on a successful project for transference of advanced planning and scheduling technology for outage management, a collaboration between Rome Laboratory, the Electrical Power Research Institute, Kaman Science, and Kestrel Institute, as part of DOD´s dual use program. The main goal of the project was to evaluate the use of transformational approaches and AI technology to solve real world planning and scheduling problems involving complex constraints. ROMAN (Rome Lab Outage Manager) is the prototype system that was developed as a result of this project. ROMAN´s main innovation compared to the current state of the art outage management tools is its integrated approach to outage management automatically enforcing safety constraints during the planning and scheduling phase. Another innovative aspect of ROMAN is its generation of more robust schedules that are feasible over time windows. In other words, ROMAN generates a family of schedules by assigning time intervals as start times to activities rather than single point start times, without affecting the overall duration of the project