Nowhere to Hide Methodology: Application of Clustering Fault Diagnosis in the Nuclear Power Industry

When a system crashes, fast and accurate log-based fault diagnosis can remarkably reduce the recovery time of the system and avoid further economic losses. Especially for the nuclear power industry, recovery time will lead not only to economic losses but also to international repercussions. Nevertheless, the massive quantity of obscure log information and the existence of hidden nodes pose major challenges to fault diagnosis and root cause determination. To overcome these obstacles, we propose the nowhere to hide (NTH) methodology, an efficient method to diagnose faults and locate root causes. We implement log-node and node-log mapping to avoid vital data loss in collecting fault logs and hidden nodes; furthermore, we utilize the logic of the nuclear power unit process system to reveal the crucial information in fault logs and hidden nodes and their causality to determine the root cause. We evaluate the methodology in a real nuclear industrial environment. The results show that system administrators can efficiently determine the root cause with the proposed methodology. Finally, we discuss the enhancements that are underway to improve the methodology.