Drs. Nam Dinh (NC State Nuclear Engineering) and Son Tran (New Mexico State Computer Science), co-principal investigators (co-PIs), have been recommended for a US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Research and Development Award. The project entitled “Trustworthiness of Digital-Twin-based Automation Technology in Nuclear Power Plant Operation” –
seeks to establish a technical basis for the development and demonstration of a trustworthiness assessment framework for automation enabled by digital twin (DT) technology for nuclear reactor operation and maintenance (O&M) procedures. DTs can be used to automate the assessment of plant state and make O&M decisions, but such automation requires that the output of DTs be trustworthy and explainable.
Methods and lessons learned from this project will be instrumental for the independent trustworthiness assessment of different automation systems using DTs, the identification of top-level automation goals based on the safety and economic requirements of nuclear reactors, the identification of sub-level DTs development plan, and the effective collection of evidence for the target trustworthiness levels. Ultimately, the framework creates the potential for the development and deployment of DT technology, advanced modeling approaches, intelligent automation systems, and unattended reactor systems to improve the reliability and economic viability of existing and next-generation commercial reactor designs.
Dr. Nam Dinh has over twenty years of R&D and engineering experience in areas of nuclear reactor thermal hydraulics and nuclear power safety. Dinh’s work has led to advanced methods and tools for nuclear reactor safety experimentation, modeling, simulation, and analysis. Dinh’s group has made advances in data-driven modeling and validation, and nearly-autonomous management and control systems in advanced reactors.
Dr. Son Tran has over twenty years of experience in the areas of knowledge representation and reasoning, automated planning, multi-agent systems, multiagent path finding, nonmonotonic reasoning, and argumentation. Tran’s group has developed several state-of-the art automated planning systems, distributed constraint optimization solvers, and explanation systems.