Integrated Robust and Resilient Control of Nuclear Power Plants for Operational Safety and High

Abstract—This paper presents an integrated robust and resilient control strategy to enhance the operational safety and performance of nuclear power plants. The objective of robust control is to min-imize the sensitivity of plant operations to exogenous disturbances and internal faults while achieving a guaranteed level of perfor-mance with a priori specified bounds of uncertainties. On the other hand, the role of resilient control is to enhance plant recovery from unanticipated adverse conditions and faults as well as from emer-gency situations by altering its operational envelope in real time. In this paper, the issues of real-time resilient control of nuclear power plants are addressed for fast response during emergency opera-tions while the features of the existing robust control technology are retained during normal operations under both steady-state and transient conditions. The proposed control methodology has been validated on the International Reactor Innovative & Secure (IRIS) simulator of nuclear power plants. Index Terms—Emergency operation, nuclear power plant, oper-ational safety, resilient control, robust control. ACRONYMS BIBO Bounded-input bounded-output. FSM Finite state machine. IRIS International reactor innovative & secure. LFT Linear fractional transformation. LOFA Loss-of-flow accident. MIMO Multi-input multi-output. RCP Reactor coolant pump. SISO Single-input single-output. NOMENCLATURE The variables that are used in the controller design procedure, described in Sections II and IV-B, are listed below