The path-planning in radioactive environment of nuclear facilities using an improved particle swarm optimization algorithm

Highlights: • Path-planning technology in radioactive environment of nuclear facilities is studied. • An improved PSO algorithm is proposed to solve path-planning problems. • The proposed method is demonstrated to be effective by 3 cases. - Abstract: It is important to ensure the radiation safety of workers in nuclear facilities. The path-planning technology is one of the effective ways to reduce the radiation exposure to the workers in the radioactive environment of nuclear facilities. This work studies the path-planning technology in radioactive environment of nuclear facilities, and proposes an improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to solve the path-planning problems. To be specific, particle swarm optimization algorithm is associated with chaos optimization algorithm, and new mathematical dose calculation models for the path-planning problem are built. Then, experimental simulation for 3 cases is carried out and the results are compared to those from traditional PSO method. In the first two cases, the average effective doses from the improved PSO method are similar to those from traditional PSO method, but its possibility that the effective dose value is too large becomes smaller. And this trend is more obvious in Case 3. Specifically, the effective dose value above 800 μSv is cut by 25% for the improved PSO method. Besides, the average effective dose decreases about 29 μSv in Case 3. Meanwhile, the overall convergence rate isn't affected. Hence, the proposed path-planning method in the radioactive environment of nuclear facilities is demonstrated to be effective through the experiments and analysis.