A framework for the selection of the right nuclear power plant

Civil nuclear reactors are used for the production of electrical energy. In the nuclear industry vendors propose several nuclear reactor designs with a size from 35–45 MWe up to 1600–1700 MWe. The choice of the right design is a multidimensional problem since a utility has to include not only financial factors as levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) and internal rate of return (IRR), but also the so called “external factors” like the required spinning reserve, the impact on local industry and the social acceptability. Therefore it is necessary to balance advantages and disadvantages of each design during the entire life cycle of the plant, usually 40–60 years. In the scientific literature there are several techniques for solving this multidimensional problem. Unfortunately it does not seem possible to apply these methodologies as they are, since the problem is too complex and it is difficult to provide consistent and trustworthy expert judgments. This paper fills the gap, proposing a two-step framework to choosing the best nuclear reactor at the pre-feasibility study phase. The paper shows in detail how to use the methodology, comparing the choice of a small-medium reactor (SMR) with a large reactor (LR), characterised, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (2006), by an electrical output respectively lower and higher than 700 MWe

Class Association Rules Mining based Rough Set Method

This paper investigates the mining of class association rules with rough set approach. In data mining, an association occurs between two set of elements when one element set happen together with another. A class association rule set (CARs) is a subset of association rules with classes specified as their consequences. We present an efficient algorithm for mining the finest class rule set inspired form Apriori algorithm, where the support and confidence are computed based on the elementary set of lower approximation included in the property of rough set theory. Our proposed approach has been shown very effective, where the rough set approach for class association discovery is much simpler than the classic association method.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure

Shared Nearest-Neighbor Quantum Game-Based Attribute Reduction with Hierarchical Coevolutionary Spark and Its Application in Consistent Segmentation of Neonatal Cerebral Cortical Surfaces

© 2012 IEEE. The unprecedented increase in data volume has become a severe challenge for conventional patterns of data mining and learning systems tasked with handling big data. The recently introduced Spark platform is a new processing method for big data analysis and related learning systems, which has attracted increasing attention from both the scientific community and industry. In this paper, we propose a shared nearest-neighbor quantum game-based attribute reduction (SNNQGAR) algorithm that incorporates the hierarchical coevolutionary Spark model. We first present a shared coevolutionary nearest-neighbor hierarchy with self-evolving compensation that considers the features of nearest-neighborhood attribute subsets and calculates the similarity between attribute subsets according to the shared neighbor information of attribute sample points. We then present a novel attribute weight tensor model to generate ranking vectors of attributes and apply them to balance the relative contributions of different neighborhood attribute subsets. To optimize the model, we propose an embedded quantum equilibrium game paradigm (QEGP) to ensure that noisy attributes do not degrade the big data reduction results. A combination of the hierarchical coevolutionary Spark model and an improved MapReduce framework is then constructed that it can better parallelize the SNNQGAR to efficiently determine the preferred reduction solutions of the distributed attribute subsets. The experimental comparisons demonstrate the superior performance of the SNNQGAR, which outperforms most of the state-of-the-art attribute reduction algorithms. Moreover, the results indicate that the SNNQGAR can be successfully applied to segment overlapping and interdependent fuzzy cerebral tissues, and it exhibits a stable and consistent segmentation performance for neonatal cerebral cortical surfaces

Uncertainty Management of Intelligent Feature Selection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are envisioned to revolutionize the paradigm of monitoring complex real-world systems at a very high resolution. However, the deployment of a large number of unattended sensor nodes in hostile environments, frequent changes of environment dynamics, and severe resource constraints pose uncertainties and limit the potential use of WSN in complex real-world applications. Although uncertainty management in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is well developed and well investigated, its implications in wireless sensor environments are inadequately addressed. This dissertation addresses uncertainty management issues of spatio-temporal patterns generated from sensor data. It provides a framework for characterizing spatio-temporal pattern in WSN. Using rough set theory and temporal reasoning a novel formalism has been developed to characterize and quantify the uncertainties in predicting spatio-temporal patterns from sensor data. This research also uncovers the trade-off among the uncertainty measures, which can be used to develop a multi-objective optimization model for real-time decision making in sensor data aggregation and samplin

A comparative study of the AHP and TOPSIS methods for implementing load shedding scheme in a pulp mill system

The advancement of technology had encouraged mankind to design and create useful equipment and devices. These equipment enable users to fully utilize them in various applications. Pulp mill is one of the heavy industries that consumes large amount of electricity in its production. Due to this, any malfunction of the equipment might cause mass losses to the company. In particular, the breakdown of the generator would cause other generators to be overloaded. In the meantime, the subsequence loads will be shed until the generators are sufficient to provide the power to other loads. Once the fault had been fixed, the load shedding scheme can be deactivated. Thus, load shedding scheme is the best way in handling such condition. Selected load will be shed under this scheme in order to protect the generators from being damaged. Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) can be applied in determination of the load shedding scheme in the electric power system. In this thesis two methods which are Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) were introduced and applied. From this thesis, a series of analyses are conducted and the results are determined. Among these two methods which are AHP and TOPSIS, the results shown that TOPSIS is the best Multi criteria Decision Making (MCDM) for load shedding scheme in the pulp mill system. TOPSIS is the most effective solution because of the highest percentage effectiveness of load shedding between these two methods. The results of the AHP and TOPSIS analysis to the pulp mill system are very promising