An Application of ASP in Nuclear Engineering: Explaining the Three Mile Island Nuclear Accident Scenario

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how Answer Set Programming (ASP) can model and explain complex nuclear plant accidents, specifically the Three Mile Island incident, aiding operator support through diagnosis and explanation modules.

Contribution

It introduces an ASP-based representation of nuclear power plants for event diagnosis and explanation, applied to the TMI-2 accident scenario.

Findings

ASP effectively models NPP behavior and events.

The system can explain the sequence of the TMI-2 accident.

Supports answering 'why' and 'what should be done' questions.

Abstract

The paper describes an ongoing effort in developing a declarative system for supporting operators in the Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) control room. The focus is on two modules: diagnosis and explanation of events that happened in NPPs. We describe an Answer Set Programming (ASP) representation of an NPP, which consists of declarations of state variables, components, their connections, and rules encoding the plant behavior. We then show how the ASP program can be used to explain the series of events that occurred in the Three Mile Island, Unit 2 (TMI-2) NPP accident, the most severe accident in the USA nuclear power plant operating history. We also describe an explanation module aimed at addressing answers to questions such as ``why an event occurs?'' or ``what should be done?'' given the collected data. This paper is *under consideration* for acceptance in TPLP Journal.