Solutions for Plant-Wide On-Line Calibration Monitoring

On-line calibration monitoring evaluates the performance of instrument channels by assessing their mutual consistency and possibly their consistency with other plant measurements. Experience at several nuclear power plants has shown this overall approach to be very effective in identifying faulty instrument channels. Most applications to date have however been confined to the monitoring of a relatively small number of instrument channels. Even though these applications have demonstrated the calibration monitoring properties of the applied techniques, questions remain open on the scalability of the same techniques to large-scale applications, where by large-scale we mean plant-wide implementations involving several hundreds if not thousands of instrument channels. In this paper, we propose a number of prospective solutions grouped in two main categories: i) solutions to handle the calibration monitoring of a very large number of instrument channels and ii) solutions to handle the ensemble of models that might derive from the decomposition of the calibration monitoring task.