An advanced disruption predictor for JET tested in a simulated real-time environment

Disruptions are sudden and unavoidable losses of confinement that may put at risk the integrity of a tokamak. However, the physical phenomena leading to disruptions are very complex and non-linear and therefore no satisfactory model has been devised so far either for their avoidance or their prediction. For this reason, machine learning techniques have been extensively pursued in the last years. In this paper a real-time predictor specifically developed for JET and based on support vector machines is presented. The main aim of the present investigation is to obtain high recognition rates in a real-time simulated environment. To this end the predictor has been tested on the time slices of entire discharges exactly as in real world operation. Since the year 2000, the experiments at JET have been organized in campaigns named sequentially beginning with campaign C1. In this paper results from campaign C1 (year 2000) and up to C19 (year 2007) are reported. The predictor has been trained with data from JET's campaigns up to C7 with particular attention to reducing the number of missed alarms, which are less than 1%, for a test set of discharges from the same campaigns used for the training. The false alarms plus premature alarms are of the order of 6.4%, for a total success rate of more than 92%. The robustness of the predictor has been proven by testing it with a wide subset of shots of more recent campaigns (from C8 to C19) without any retraining. The success rate over the period between C8 and C14 is on average 88% and never falls below 82%, confirming the good generalization capabilities of the developed technique. After C14, significant modifications were implemented on JET and its diagnostics and consequently the success rates of the predictor between C15 and C19 decays to an average of 79%. Finally, the performance of the developed detection system has been compared with the predictions of the JET protection system (JPS). The new predictor clearly outperforms JPS up to about 180 ms before the disruptions.