• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.3
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• pp.839-849
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• 2023

The development of automation technology to reduce human error by minimizing human intervention is accelerating with artificial intelligence and big data processing technology, even in the nuclear field. Among nuclear power plant operation modes, the startup and shutdown operations are still performed manually and thus have the potential for human error. As part of the development of an autonomous operation system for startup operation, this paper proposes an action coordinating strategy to obtain the optimal actions. The lower level of the system consists of operating blocks that are created by analyzing the operation tasks to achieve local goals through soft actor-critic algorithms. However, when multiple agents try to perform conflicting actions, a method is needed to coordinate them, and for this, an action coordination strategy was developed in this work as the upper level of the system. Three quantification methods were compared and evaluated based on the future plant state predicted by plant parameter prediction models using long short-term memory networks. Results confirmed that the optimal action to satisfy the limiting conditions for operation can be selected by coordinating the action sets. It is expected that this methodology can be generalized through future research.

• Journal of Korean Society on Water Environment
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.524-531
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• 2014

Korea has been trying to manage water quality of rivers and lakes in many ways. Ministry of Environment is making continuous efforts of operation control improvement such as strengthening effluent standards in sewage treatment plants and expanding Tele-Monitoring System (TMS). However, evaluation method for operations of sewage treatment plants and establishment system of effluent standards are inadequate. The objective of this study is to evaluate for operations of sewage treatment plants using statistics technique such as frequency analysis, percentile, normal distribution analysis. We used the effluent data (BOD, COD, SS) collected at 299 plants in 2012. The values were very low by comparison with standards. The Data followed a normal distribution. We think that distribution characteristics are closely related with effluent standards, especially T-P and BOD. Statistics technique attempted in this study can be used to evaluate for operations of sewage treatment plants and assess the appropriateness of effluent standards based on TBEL(Technology-based effluent limitation). And, this technique can be used to figure out the overall level of plants, the status of each plant and the favorable treatment process for each item (BOD, COD etc.). Data acquired through this method can be used to improve facilities and operation techniques and decide on a sewerage policy.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.46 no.6
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• pp.737-752
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• 2014

As condition-based maintenance (CBM) has risen as a new trend, there has been an active movement to apply information technology for effective implementation of CBM in power plants. This motivation is widespread in operations and maintenance, including monitoring, diagnosis, prognosis, and decision-making on asset management. Thermal efficiency analysis in nuclear power plants (NPPs) is a longstanding concern being updated with new methodologies in an advanced IT environment. It is also a prominent way to differentiate competitiveness in terms of operations and maintenance costs. Although thermal performance tests implemented using industrial codes and standards can provide officially trustworthy results, they are essentially resource-consuming and maybe even a hind-sighted technique rather than a foresighted one, considering their periodicity. Therefore, if more accurate performance monitoring can be achieved using advanced data analysis techniques, we can expect more optimized operations and maintenance. This paper proposes a framework and describes associated methodologies for in-situ thermal performance analysis, which differs from conventional performance monitoring. The methodologies are effective for monitoring, diagnosis, and prognosis in pursuit of CBM. Our enabling techniques cover the intelligent removal of random and systematic errors, deviation detection between a best condition and a currently measured condition, degradation diagnosis using a structured knowledge base, and prognosis for decision-making about maintenance tasks. We also discuss how our new methods can be incorporated with existing performance tests. We provide guidance and directions for developers and end-users interested in in-situ thermal performance management, particularly in NPPs with large steam turbines.

• Advances in Energy Research
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.147-166
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• 2020

Industrial cooling towers are often ageing infrastructure that is expensive to maintain and operate. A novel approach is introduced in which a heat pump circuit is incorporated to reduce the load upon the towers by extracting low-grade energy from the stream sent to the towers and repurposing in on-site processing operations. To demonstrate the concept, a model was constructed, which uses industrial data on cooling towers linked to a smelter's sulphuric acid plant, to allow direct economic and environmental impact comparison between different heat recovery and repurposing scenarios. The model's results showed that implementing a heat pump system would significantly decrease annual operating costs and achieve a payback period of 3 years. In addition, overall CO₂ emissions could be reduced by 42% (430,000 kg/year) and a 5% heat load reduction on the cooling towers achieved. The concept is significant as the outcomes introduce a new way for energy intensive industrial sectors, such as mineral processing, to reduce energy consumption and improve long-term sustainable performance.

• Proceedings of the Korean Operations and Management Science Society Conference
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• 2005.05a
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• pp.106-111
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• 2005

In nuclear power plant, the source of the energy is generated from the nuclear fuel rod. Given a certain level of consumption, the burnt fuel rod should be removed and replaced by a new(fresh) one. The burnt fuel is approximately one third of the whole fuel rods. Currently, this operation is done manually using paper documents and verbal communication and consumes a lot of operation time. In this study, we develop an computerized operation process of nuclear fuel rod replacement procedure based on the ERP(Enterprise Resource planning) methodology.

• Journal of Applied Tourism Food and Beverage Management and Research
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• v.11
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• pp.135-135
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• 2000

The financial performance over the twenty four-year period (1968-1991) was analyzed with respect to six performance measures : current ratio, net sales to working capital for liquidity, total liabilities to net worth for solvency, asset turnover for activity, return on assets for profitability, and cost of operations for operating. Interesting enough, small size hotel companies have enjoyed great profitability while relatively big hotel companies have fallen under the average. Further, after a certain level of firm size, the costs of operations increase, not decrease, as plant size increase. This results lead to a conclusion that getting bigger is not always good financial decision.

• Proceedings of the Korean Operations and Management Science Society Conference
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• 1996.04a
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• pp.403-406
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• 1996

Since most human activities in a nuclear power plant are perfirmed in the main control room (MCR), it is important to have its design well human-engineered, both physically and cognitively. Much research efforts have been given for better, operator-centered designs of human-machine interface in MCR capitalizing today's advanced information technology. Korea is among those who are actively expending such research for the next-generation nuclear plants. This paper analyzes two forerunners among the emerging MCR designs, namely Nuplex 80+ and N4, from the perspective of cognitive systems engineering. Since the two show some fundamental differences in their design concepts, the principles with their pros and cons must be enumerated to benefit our own design of new control rooms. This paper also lists many other decision-making points that emerged due to the new availability of cognitively based on cognitive engineering principles. The future scope and directions of related research are suggested.

• Proceedings of the Korean Operations and Management Science Society Conference
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• 2000.04a
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• pp.530-533
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• 2000

Recently, Manufacturers have recognized the importance of recycling because of the limitation of natural resources and new and proposed laws and legislations that assign responsibility to manufacturer for the ultimate disposal of their products and the environmental problems. In this paper, products assembled recyclable parts and non-recyclable parts are collected after consumer usage and go into a plant. And the collected recyclable parts are disassembled through the disassembly process and have three attributes - re-usable attribute, re-manufacturing attribute and dumping attribute. In this situation, we deal with a production planning for recycle-oriented manufacturing system. The proposed model maximizing the profit in a system is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming. And then a numerical example is used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model

• Proceedings of the Korean Operations and Management Science Society Conference
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• 1995.04a
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• pp.958-961
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• 1995

MODROC 기법이 대표적인 일반화된 기계-셀 형성 기법은 부품 생산비용, 부품가공시간, 공정순서, 로트 크기 등을 고려하여, 기계-셀을 형성함에 있어, 보다 현실적인 접근을 추구한 것이다. 그러나, 수리적 문제 해결의 한계로 인해 현실 접근성이 제한되며, 신경망을 이용한 기존의 기법들 역시 수리적 제한환경을 설정한 것이어서 현실적인 응용가능성이 떨어지고 있다. 본 논문에서는 공정순서와 공장배치를 고려하여 기계-셀의 효율적인 형성을 꾀하였다. 신경망 모델인 자기조직화 형성기법을 응용하였으며, 공장 작업영역과 기계-셀의 위치가 주어짐에 따라 공정순서를 고려하여 물류의 이동을 최소화하는 기계-셀의 형성 방법을 꾀하였다. 본 기계-셀 형성 방법은 기존의 방식에 비해 짧은 시간에 기계-셀을 형성할 수 있으며, 그에 따른 부품군의 형성은 공정을 고려하여 총 물류량을 감소시키는 방향으로 결정되는 장점을 갖고 있다. 또한, 다변화되는 환경에 대한 적응성과 예외적 요소(exceptional element)에 대한 셀 형성 및 처리가 매우 유연하게 나타내어 진다. 본 연구에서는 공정 간에 기계의 중복이 있는 경우의 기계-셀 형성 문제에 대해 제한된 기법을 적용하였다.

• Proceedings of the Korean Operations and Management Science Society Conference
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.327-331
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• 2006

This paper considers an integrated inventory-distribution system with a fleet of heterogeneous vehicles employed where a single warehouse distributes a single type of products to many spatially distributed retailers to satisfy their dynamic demands and the product is provided to the warehouse via procurement ordering from any manufacturing plant or market The Problem is formulated as an Mixed Integer Programming with the objective function of minimizing the sum of inventory holding cost (at the warehouse and retailers), and transportation cost and procurement ordering cost at the warehouse, subject to inventory-balancing constraints, ordering constraints, vehicle capacity constraints and transportation time constraints. The problem is Proven to be NP-hard. Accordingly, a Lagrangean heuristic procedure is derived and tested for its effectiveness through computational experiments with some numerical instances.