Response Surface Methodology for the analysis of reactor safety: methodology, development and implementation

Reactor safety engineering utilizes RSM techniques as a tool to aid the recovery of information from large simulation codes. The growing interest in the topic, and the need for rigorous methods in risk and reliability analysis have stimulated systematic studies which will lead to the production of an RSM handbook for safety engineering purposes. This paper deals with recent developments in the area which are reported under three main headings: a re-evaluation of the philosophy of using RSM techniques with nuclear safety codes; a comparative study of suitable response functions and experimental design procedures for use in RSM; and a preliminary discussion of multioutput code RSM analysis. The theoretical developments will be shown with reference to their practical applications