Title
FuelGen: Effective Evolutionary Design of Refuellings for Pressurized Water Reactors
Abstract
The paper describes the design of an efficient and robust genetic algorithm for the nuclear fuel loading problem (i.e. refuellings: the in-core fuel management problem) - a complex combinatorial, multimodal optimisation. Evolutionary computation as performed by FUELGEN replaces heuristic search of the kind performed by the FUELCON expert system (CAI 12/4), to solve the same problem. In contrast to the traditional genetic algorithm which makes strong requirements on the representation used and its parameter settings in order to be efficient, the results of recent research on new, robust genetic algorithms show that representations unsuitable for the traditional genetic algorithm carl still be used to good effect with little parameter adjustment.The representation presented here is a simple symbolic one with no linkage attributes, making the genetic algorithm particularly easy to apply to fuel loading problems with differing core structures and assembly inventories. A nonlinear fitness function has been constructed to direct the search efficiently in the presence of the many local optima that result from the constraint on solutions.
Year
Venue
Field
1998
COMPUTERS AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Heuristic,Nonlinear system,Local optimum,Computer science,Expert system,Algorithm,Evolutionary computation,Fitness function,Genetic representation,Genetic algorithm
DocType
Volume
Issue
Journal
17
2-3
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0232-0274
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jun Zhao100.34
Brian Knight214822.62
Ephraim Nissan316421.59
Alan Soper400.68