Projects
As we live a time in which safety is an integral ingredient of our society, especially in the face of climate change and a nuclear renaissance, efforts are being made in the direction of the next generation of Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) with regards to methods and software. The OpenPRA initiative hopes to present a more informative view of the actual systems, components, and interactions that PRA models represent to help decision makers go forward into the future.
Over the last few years, non classical solution algorithms and modeling methods in nuclear PRA have been extensively studied. The concern of these investigations has been to end the use of (1) numerical approximations for which we do not know the error factors, (2) modeling methods which leave out perhaps critical elements of the actual plant, and (3) lack of good man-machine and organizational modeling techniques.
From all these investigations, some alarming issues related to large, safety critical PSA models have been raised, which we feel need to be addressed before new calculation engines or next generation user interfaces are put into place:
- Better visualization of PRA results.
- Difficulty of different software working with the same PRA model.
- Lack of data and software backward and forward compatibility.
- No universal format for industry data.
- Quality assurance of calculations.
- Un-founded reliance on numerical approximations and truncation.
- Portability of the models between different software.
- Clarity of the models.
- Completeness of the models.
- Modeling of human actions.
- Modeling of autonomous control systems.
Our Projects
Aside from new calculation engines and user interfaces, it is clear that a schema for large, safety critical PRA models, a representation which is independent of all PRA software, should be the step forward in addressing the above issues.