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DTRA’s advancements in nuclear and radiological detection
A new, more complex nuclear age has begun. Echoing the tensions of the Cold War amid rapidly evolving nuclear and radiological threats, preparedness in the modern age is a contest of scientific innovation. The Research and Development Directorate (RD) at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) is charged with winning this contest.
Miltiadis Alamaniotis (Univ of Texas at San Antonio)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1691-1697
In this work a new methodology for monitoring reactor systems is introduced and its application on pressurized water reactor (PWR) data is presented. The methodology implements a synergistic framework of various relevance vector machines and fuzzy inference. The goal of the framework is to fuse the sensor readings and provide them in a solid form to the operator: this solid form is identified as the state of the reactor. Initially, each of the relevance vector machines fuses the data taken from a specific set of sensors, which have been assigned to it. In the next step, the fused data in the form of a nominal value are forwarded to a fuzzy inference system that takes the values of all the relevance vector machines and further fuses the data by providing a single value that matches the state of the reactor. This proposed methodology is applied on a set of real-world data taken from the LOFT Facility, which is a setup to simulate a pressurized water reactor. Results demonstrate the efficiency of the method in identifying the correct reactor state, while reducing the volume of processing data.