A pattern recognition approach based on DTW for automatic transient identification in nuclear power plants

Automatic identification of transients in nuclear power plants (NPPs) allows monitoring the fatigue damage accumulated by critical components during plant operation, and is therefore of great importance for ensuring that usage factors remain within the original design bases postulated by the plant designer. Although several schemes to address this important issue have been explored in the literature, there is still no definitive solution available. In the present work, a new method for automatic transient identification is proposed, based on the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm, largely used in other related areas such as signature or speech recognition. The novel transient identification system is evaluated on real operational data following a rigorous pattern recognition protocol. Results show the high accuracy of the proposed approach, which is combined with other interesting features such as its low complexity and its very limited requirements of training data.