Knowledge-based system for core operation management of boiling water reactors

A knowledge-based system, which supports designers in the core operation management of boiling water reactors, has been developed. The system consists of (1) the knowledge base to store heuristics of experienced designers in the forms of rules, functions and frames: (2) the inference program with automatic deletion and generation of those data which have to be modified: and (3) rule refinement and editing support programs to find and correct those rules necessary to obtain a better inference result. Through the performance evaluation of the system, the number of rules for modification of data was reduced by 40% with the inference program, and designers with different experiences reached the same solution. As for the modification of rules in the knowledge base by the system manager, the time for searching and determining the value was decreased by 90%.<>