To Appear Nuclear Engineering and DesignOn the Automated Assessment of Nuclear Reactor Systems Code Accuracy

An automated code assessment program (ACAP) has been developed to provide quantitative comparisons between nuclear reactor systems (NRS) code results and experimental measurements. The tool provides a suite of metrics for quality of fit to specific data sets, and the means to produce one or more figures of merit (FOM) for a code, based on weighted averages of results from the batch execution of a large number of code-experiment and code-code data compar-isons. Accordingly, this tool has the potential to significantly streamline the verification and validation (V&V) processes in NRS code development environments which are characterized by rapidly evolving software, many contributing devel-opers and a large and growing body of validation data. In this paper, a survey of data conditioning and analysis techniques is summarized which focuses on their rele-vance to nuclear reactor systems (NRS) code accuracy assessment. A number of methods are considered for their applica-bility to the automated assessment of the accuracy of NRS code simulations, through direct comparisons with experimental measurements or other simulations. A variety of data types and computational modeling methods are con-sidered from a spectrum of mathematical and engineering disciplines. The goal of the survey was to identify needs, issues and techniques to be considered in the development of an automated code assessment procedure, to be used in United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) advanced T/H code consolidation efforts. The ACAP software wa