Generation Method of Educational Materials Using Qualitative Reasoning

Abstract

Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry has developed a nuclear power plant educational system in which educational materials for several events are included. The system effectively teaches operators by tailoring the event explanations to their knowledge levels of understanding. The preparation of the educational materials, however, is laborious and this becomes one of the problems in the practical use of the system. Discussed in the present paper is a basic explanation generation method using qualitative reasoning. This has been developed to solve the problem.Qualitative equations describing a recirculation pumps trip were transformed into production rules. These were stored in the knowledge base of an event explanation generation system together with explanation sentences. When an operator selects a certain variable's time-interval in which he wants to know the reasons for a variable change, the inference engine searches for the rule which satisfies both the qualitative value and qualitative differential value concerned with this time-interval. Then the event explanation generation section provides explanations by combining the explanation sentences attached to the rules. This paper demonstrates that it is possible to apply qualitative reasoning to such complex reactor systems, and also that explanations can be generated using the simulation results from a transient analysis code.