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Safe, secure, and economic operation of nuclear power plants will remain of strategic significance. New and improved monitoring will likely have increased significance in the post-Fukushima world. Prior to Fukushima, many activities were already underway globally to facilitate operation of nuclear power plants beyond their initial licensing periods. Decisions to shut down a nuclear power plant are mostly driven by economic considerations. Online condition monitoring is a means to improve both the safety and economics of extending the operating lifetimes of nuclear power plants, enabling adoption of proactive aging management. With regard to active components (e.g., pumps, valves, motors, etc.), significant experience in other industries has been leveraged to build the science base to support adoption of online condition-based maintenance and proactive aging management in the nuclear industry. Many of the research needs are associated with enabling proactive management of aging in passive components (e.g., pipes, vessels, cables, containment structures, etc.). This paper provides an overview of online condition monitoring for the nuclear power industry with an emphasis on passive components. Following the overview, several technology/knowledge gaps are identified, which require addressing to facilitate widespread online condition monitoring of passive components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the synthesis of bisphenol A, it is necessary to monitor the catalytic activity of ion exchanger catalyst online. A new online method to monitor the catalyst activity is proposed. Factors affecting catalyst activity are taken into consideration to compute its value using support vector machine and mathematical regression. Simulation and real operation results confirm the effectiveness of this method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drinking water systems represent one of the critical infrastructures that are essential for the well-being of the general population. Consequently, risk management strategies need to be applied to these systems to strengthen their safety under exposure to various types of hazards. The process of developing management actions, with respect to new technologies and procedures, can be guided by recent advances in this field, and particularly those produced under the U.S. EPA water security program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an approach based on assume-guarantee style reasoning for automatic detection of software failures. Reasoning about failures requires knowing the expected behavior. The paper considers the case when the requirement specification of the behavior of the target system is available, and expressed in a formalism based on communicating finite state machines. The failure detector observes the external inputs and outputs, and receives partial information about the internal state of the target system. Using this information, it interprets the specification, and determines whether a failure has occurred. A key issue in the interpretation of the specification is the efficiency of handling of inherent nondeterminism present in the specification. The paper describes, in a step by step manner, a compositional approach for online failure detection which reduces the computational costs of dealing with non-determinism. The details of the algorithms required in each of the steps are provided. To evaluate the algorithms described, a prototype failure detector was used to detect failures of the control program of a small telephone exchange. We present some of the results obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]