Fundamental Study on Scheduling of Inspection Process for Fast Reactor Plants

Preventive maintenance has been widely used in many industries, including the power sector. To realize the reasonable and effective maintenance of nuclear power plants, it is essential to optimize the maintenance scheduling management from the viewpoints of both safety and efficiency. The optimization of maintenance schedules has experienced a significant increase in attention over recent years, so our main objective is to develop and implement an automatic scheduling system for addressing the inspection-process-scheduling problem in sodium-cooled fast reactor plants. As a fundamental study, we propose an inspection-process-scheduling model that minimizes the total number of inspections in a fast reactor while ensuring the reliability of the safety-critical functions. In this study, we formulate the inspection-process-scheduling problem as an integer programming problem. Computing the inspection-process schedules for a simplified fast reactor plant model, we verified that the proposed model can provide the optimal schedule automatically.