Integrating gray system theory and logistic regression into case-based reasoning for safety assessment of thermal power plants

Safety assessment of thermal power plants (TPPs) is one of the important means to guarantee the safety of production in thermal power production enterprises. Due to various technical limitations, existing assessment approaches, such as analytic hierarchy process (AHP), Monte Carlo methods, artificial neural network (ANN), etc., are unable to meet the requirements of the complex security assessment of TPPs. Currently, most of the security assessments of TPP are completed by the means of experts' evaluations. Accordingly, the assessment conclusions are greatly affected by the subjectivity of the experts. Essentially, the evaluation of power plant systems relies to a large extent on the knowledge and length of experience of the experts. Therefore in this domain case-based reasoning (CBR) is introduced for the security assessment of TPPs since this methodology models expertise through experience management. Taking the management system of TPPs as breakthrough point, this paper presents a case-based approach for the Safety assessment decision support of TPPs (SATPP). First, this paper reviews commonly used approaches for TPPs security assessment and the current general evaluation process of TPPs security assessment. Then a framework for the Management System Safety Assessment of Thermal Power Plants (MSSATPP) is constructed and an intelligent decision support system for MSSATPP (IDSS-MSSATPP) is functionally designed. IDSS-MSSATPP involves several key technologies and methods such as knowledge representation and case matching. A novel case matching method named Improved Gray CBR (IGCBR) has been developed in which a statistical approach (logistic regression) and Gray System theory are integrated. Instead of applying Gray System theory directly, it has been improved to integrate it better into CBR. In addition this paper describes an experimental prototype system of IDSS-MSSATPP(CBRsys-TPP) in which IGCBR is integrated. The experimental results based on a MSSATPP data set show that CBRsys-TPP has high accuracy and systematically good performance. Further comparative studies with several other common classification approaches also show its competitive power in terms of accuracy and the synergistic effects of the integrated components. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.