A Long-term Dependent and Trustworthy Approach to Reactor Accident Prognosis based on Temporal Fusion Transformer

Abstract: Prognosis of the reactor accident is a crucial way to ensure appropriate strategies are adopted to avoid radioactive releases. However, there is very limited research in the field of nuclear industry. In this paper, we propose a method for accident prognosis based on the Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) model with multi-headed self-attention and gating mechanisms. The method utilizes multiple covariates to improve prediction accuracy on the one hand, and quantile regression methods for uncertainty assessment on the other. The method proposed in this paper is applied to the prognosis after loss of coolant accidents (LOCAs) in HPR1000 reactor. Extensive experimental results show that the method surpasses novel deep learning-based prediction methods in terms of prediction accuracy and confidence. Furthermore, the interference experiments with different signal-to-noise ratios and the ablation experiments for static covariates further illustrate that the robustness comes from the ability to extract the features of static and historical covariates. In summary, this work for the first time applies the novel composite deep learning model TFT to the prognosis of key parameters after a reactor accident, and makes a positive contribution to the establishment of a more intelligent and staff-light maintenance method for reactor systems.