Advanced Probabilistic Risk Assessment Research & Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Abstract

The Socio-Technical Risk Analysis Industry Affiliates Program (SoTeRiA-IAP) is an industry-facing entity within the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) that leverages Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) research, conducted by the SoTeRiA Laboratory (http://soteria.npre.illinois.edu/), to bridge scientific innovation and industry challenges. The SoTeRiA team helps nuclear power plants resolve emergent regulatory design standards and enhance plants’ capabilities for Enterprise Risk Management (ERM). The SoTeRiA team is advancing PRA by explicitly incorporating the underlying science of accident causation into risk scenarios, contributing to two key areas of theoretical and methodological development: (1) spatio-temporal causal modeling of social and physical failure mechanisms in PRA to address the risk that emerges at the interface of human and technical systems, and (2) the fusion of big data analytics with PRA. The SoTeRiA team has integrated classical PRA techniques with simulation-based methods, leading to the development of a new multi-level computational platform, called Integrated PRA (I-PRA), that enables the coupling of underlying failure mechanisms with component-level failures and system-level risk scenarios. This talk provides an overview of some of SoTeRiA’s on-going research projects to enhance collaboration between the SoTeRiA-IAP and the Idaho National Laboratory risk analysis team.