Maintenance strategy design for nuclear reactors safety systems using a constraint particle swarm evolutionary methodology

To keep standby safety systems at a high level of availability once on demand, most of them are tested and maintained regularly. These test and maintenance activities sometimes are cost-benefit issues.

For stakeholders of a NPP, two maintenance strategies are typically desired: 1) for a given budget, the safety systems’ unavailability (i.e., risk) is minimal; or 2) under the premise of meeting a risk threshold, the maintenance cost is minimal. Yet these maintenance strategies are often involved in optimization issues with nonlinear constraints and mixed integers. To solve these issues, in this contribution, an integrated optimization framework based on a constraint particle swarm evolutionary methodology is developed for optimal design of maintenance strategies for NPPs.