An expert system for emergency response

An expert system, the Reactor Safety Assessment System (RSAS), is being developed by the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for the NRC Operations Center. The RSAS is intended to aid the reactor safety team (RST) at the operations center in monitoring and projecting core and containment status during an emergency at a licensed nuclear power plant. The RSAS system development has two major aspects. The first is the compilation and storage of knowledge required for RST assessment tasks. The knowledge structure used by RSAS is a goal tree-success tree (GTST) model. The upper level structure of the GTST model is generic in nature. This allows development of models for generic plant-specific GTST models. The second aspect of the RSAS is the development of inferencing techniques for the access, display, and manipulation of the knowledge to meet RST requirements in a real-time manner during the activation of the operations center. This objective is achieved by critical safety function and success path monitoring. This basic strategy is used to determine the current status and estimate future challenges to the status of the reactor, identify procedures and equipment required to maintain or regain the critical safety functions, identify critical equipment, determine information requirements, and display pertinent information concerning current reactor status