Canadian CANDU Plant Historical Data Systems: A Review and Look to the Future

Abstract

As part of several CANDU Owner's Group (COG) projects, AECL has conducted a review of current approaches and investigated solutions to plant process data collection, management, and use. Emphasis was placed on understanding the existing functionality and uses of plant data systems, their future needs and benefits. The result is a vision of a plant-wide Historical Data System (HDS) providing seamless access to both near real-time and historical data, user tool-kits for data visualization and analysis, and data management of the large volume of data acquired during the life of a plant. HDS technology is critical to the implementation of technical surveillance and analysis, predictive and preventative maintenance programs, and other efforts necessary to enhance plant safety, availability, production and productivity. HDS technology will lead to higher capability and capacity factors while minimizing operations, maintenance, and administration (OM and A) costs.