The design characteristics of an advanced alarm system for SMART

An advanced alarm system (AAS) is primarily a digital system employing advanced alarm process logics and a VDU (visual display unit) based control and display for the alarms. The SMART-AS (system-integrated modular advanced reactor-alarm system) is an AAS. The role of SMART-AS is to provide the information necessary to safely shutdown the reactor under all plant conditions, to monitor the plant parameters approaching or exceeding the operating limits and to minimize the number of alarms, and to group and prioritize the alarms. The purpose of the alarm processing is to extract only the most important and the most relevant data out of the large amount of available information. This is achieved by using active database technologies for alarm data to form the alarms. An active database is able to monitor special situations represented by events and conditions. Hence, active database system (ADS) can recognize specific situations and react to them without direct explicit user or application requests. ADS is very useful for timely applications such as an advanced alarm processing. This paper describes the design characteristics of the SMART-AS and the results of prototyping of the SMART-AS for improving the system’s reliability and availability by using a reliability prediction. Also this paper proposes a new approach to an advanced alarm processing by using event–condition–action (ECA) rules that can be automatically triggered by an active database.