Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

In nuclear power plants (NPP), and at OPG, due to continuous moves of experienced personnel to different department or retirements, a vast amount of expertise and systems-specific knowledge is lost. This leads to longer training periods for new employees and sometimes to delayed responses to problems. The loss of expertise costs OPG a large amount of money as they have to invest in training less experienced staff, and leads to indirect losses in delayed or wrong activities, in particular in reactor maintenance and inspection activities. Moreover, the unavailability of expert systems limited the ability of staff to perform their tasks effectively. Another challenge and need to retain engineering knowledge is specific activities such as refurbishment or decommissioning, which are repeated over a long period of time (20-50 years) which did not enable building expertise in these areas, and transferring expertise became important. The challenges include: retirement of expertise in NPP; transformation and diversity of technologies in plant operation and maintenance; advancement in communications between human-human, machine-human, brain-machine, and machine-machine; and expensive and time consuming training of young generation plant engineers and personal. This project is aiming at the design of novel next generation operation experience support system by learning from engineering and operational data, as well as human experience and build comprehensive knowledgebase to support critical operation activities in timely manner. The project will demonstrate the development of Intelligent Experience Retention System (IERS) to be demonstrated with a number of case studies within OPG, prior to wide deployment in a number of sections. The project will include conceptual design, implementation, testing and AFS (Available For Service) of the IERS as a self-learning automated intelligent system that retains the personnel expertise, analyses it, and makes it ready to answer related questions asked by inexperienced employees.