Development of the 'Three-stage' Bayesian procedure and a reliability data processing code

3단계 베이지안 처리절차 및 신뢰도 자료 처리 코드 개발

A reliability data processing MPRDP (Multi-Purpose Reliability Data Processor) has been developed in FORTRAN language since Jan. 1992 at KAERI (Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute). The purpose of the research is to construct a reliability database(plant-specific as well as generic) by processing various kinds of reliability data in most objective and systematic fashion. To account for generic estimates in various compendia as well as generic plants' operating experience, we developed a 'three-stage' Bayesian procedure[1] by logically combining the 'two-stage' procedure[2] and the idea for processing generic estimates[3]. The first stage manipulates generic plant data to determine a set of estimates for generic parameters,e.g. the mean and the error factor, which accordingly defines a generic failure rate distribution. Then the second stage combines these estimates with the other ones proposed by various generic compendia (we call these generic book type data). This stage adopts another Bayesian procedure to determine the final generic failure rate distribution which is to be used as a priori distribution in the third stage. Then the third stage updates the generic distribution by plant-specific data resulting in a posterior failure rate distribution. Both running failure and demand failure data can be handled in this code. In accordance with the growing needs for a consistent and well-structured reliability database, we constructed a generic reliability database by the MPRDP code[4]. About 30 generic data sources were reviewed and available data were collected and screened from them. We processed reliability data for about 100 safety related components frequently modeled in PSA. The underlying distribution for the failure rate was assumed to be lognormal or gamma, according to the PSA convention. The dependencies among the generic sources were not considered at this time. This problem will be approached in further study.