Identification of pressurized water reactor transient using template matching

Template matching, which is a pattern recognition method, was adopted to identify the transient in a pressurized water reactor (PWR). The transient data were generated using a plant simulation code, PCTran-PWR, and transformed into a feature vector sequence (FVS). The data set contained such FVS as the reference transients. To compare the FVS of the test transient and reference transient, a cost function was defined and dynamic programming was applied to obtain the minimum cost function value, which would indicate the degree of matching between the two transients. Considering the discrepancy between the real plant and the model to generate the transient data, the same test and reference transient may not be matched exactly. A dynamic threshold value was designed to determine if the test transient matched the reference transient of the data set. Experiments were performed and the results showed that the method was successful.

► Template matching, which is a pattern recognition method, was adopted to identify the transient in a pressurized water reactor (PWR).
► The plant transient data were transformed into a feature vector sequence which can characterize the transient behavior.
► The forward dynamic programming was adopted to compare the similarity between the test transient and the reference transient of the data set.
► Also, rules were implemented to constrain the search space, which saved computation time.
► The threshold was defined, which was used to determine whether the test transient matched the reference transient.