Market-Based and System-Wide Fuel Cycle Optimization

The Dynamic Resource Exchange (DRE) gives agency to consumer facilities to determine the preference of any particular trade that is offered by suppliers to satisfy its requests. This provides a natural balance of power in the relationship between consumers and suppliers. However, in situations in which suppliers have flexibility surrounding the way that they respond to individual requests, they have no mechanism to assess how different bids will be received by the consumer. Theoretically, a supplier can offer multiple bids to respond to a given request in an attempt to cover their bases, but this introduces more arcs into the underlying network flow problem, increasing the cost to solve the problem. In the extreme, when a supplier can continuously vary the characteristics of the bid, this can represent a large number of additional arcs and have real performance consequences. To remedy this inefficiency in the implementation of the market-level optimization, the definition of a request has been extended to include a function that can be used by the supplier to query the preference that would be assigned by a consumer for a potential bid. The supplier is then free to implement arbitrarily complex algorithms to revise/optimize its bid based on responses to this function. A supplier can chose to not invoke the function at all, mimicking the original DRE behavior, can use it to select among a small set of discrete choices, or can implement an internal algorithm to seek an optimum bid on a continuous parameter space. This capability was demonstrated with a storage facility that preferred material with a specific decay heat that was as close as possible to the maximum allowable decay heat, while requiring the specific decay heat to fall between a minimum and maximum level. This archetype was used to fill multiple storage roles in a simulation that also included a standard recipe reactor: wet storage with no maximum allowable specific decay heat, dry storage with a modest maximum allowable specific decay heat, and a geologic repository with a low maximum allowable specific decay heat. In such a simulation, the reactor, wet storage and dry storage always offer their material to be taken by one of the other storage facilities. The preference function of the consumer would always ensure that material only flowed when the decay heat was sufficiently low, but in the absence of objective function callbacks, would allow for many superfluous offers that exceeded those limits. If this archetype also uses a callback function to probe the preference of the receiving facility for each possible offer, it can avoid making offers that are not going to be accepted by the receiving facility.