Parameter identifiability of Boolean networks with application to fault diagnosis of nuclear plants

Fault diagnosis depends critically on the selection of sensors monitoring crucial process variables. Boolean network (BN) is composed of nodes and directed edges, where the node state is quantized to the Boolean values of True or False and is determined by the logical functions of the network parameters and the states of other nodes with edges directed to this node. Since BN can describe the fault propagation in a sensor network, it can be applied to propose sensor selection strategy for fault diagnosis. In this article, a sufficient condition for parameter identifiability of BN is first proposed, based on which the sufficient condition for fault identifiability of a sensor network is given. Then, the fault identifiability condition induces a sensor selection strategy for sensor selection. Finally, the theoretical result is applied to the fault diagnosis-oriented sensor selection for a nuclear heating reactor plant, and both the numerical computation and simulation results verify the feasibility of the newly built BN-based sensor selection strategy.