An incident management system for nuclear power plants

The management of personnel, operator actions, and decision making is a critical task and raises specific issues that deserve attention. We outline a framework for formal decision making relevant to an incident management advisory system in nuclear power plants. During the determination of attributes for incident management, the decision maker selected a total of five attributes: economics, radiological dose, industrial accidents, safety, and stakeholder attention. We faced several issues related to the disutility determination for these attributes. Solutions to these issues included engaging multidimensional consistency checks via set indifference levels and developing a technique called "measurable equivalence" whereby known equalities (e.g., the response of dose causing a fatality) are used to determine attribute weights. These solution techniques illustrated shortcomings in our original framework in which we relied on a popular decision making technique called the Analytic Hierarchy Process. The end product of our research was a methodology and software prototype suitable for incident management at nuclear power plant facilities.