Unsupervised learning algorithm for signal validation in emergency situations at nuclear power plants

Abstract

This paper proposes an algorithm for signal validation using unsupervised methods in emergency situations at nuclear power plants (NPPs) when signals are rapidly changing. The algorithm aims to determine the stuck failures of signals in real time based on a variational auto-encoder (VAE), which employs unsupervised learning, and long short-term memory (LSTM). The application of unsupervised learning enables the algorithm to detect a wide range of stuck failures, even those that are not trained. First, this paper discusses the potential failure modes of signals in NPPs and reviews previous studies conducted on signal validation. Then, an algorithm for detecting signal failures is proposed by applying LSTM and VAE. To overcome the typical problems of unsupervised learning processes, such as trainability and performance issues, several optimizations are carried out to select the inputs, determine the hyper-parameters of the network, and establish the thresholds to identify signal failures. Finally, the proposed algorithm is validated and demonstrated using a compact nuclear simulator.

Keywords

• Nuclear power plants
• Signal failures
• Signal validation
• Variational auto-encoder
• Long short-term memory
• Unsupervised learning