Refueling in nuclear engineering: the FUELCON project

摘要

Over a time span of almost a decade, the FUELCON project in nuclear engineering has led to a fullyfunctional expert system and spawned sequel projects. Its task is in-core fuel management, alsocalled 'refueling', i.e., good fuel-allocation for reloading the core of a given nuclear reactor, for agiven operation cycle. The task is crucial for keeping down operation costs at nuclear power plants.Fuel comes in different types and is positioned in a grid representing the core of a reactor. The tool isuseful for practitioners but also helps the expert in the domain to test his or her rules of thumb and todiscover new ones.