Introduction
In 2007, 30 countries were operating a total of 439 commercial nuclear power reactors which contributed about 16% of the world’s total electrical power. With concerns about global warming it is likely that more reactors will be built in the near future.
In this paper we will describe, in general terms, the operation of a commercial nuclear reactor and how this leads to a difficult problem in combinatorial optimisation. We then describe the principles of the Estimation of Distribution Algorithm (EDA) and how we have adapted it to solve a combinatorial problem, it is demonstrated using the travelling salesman problem. Next we explain how the method was modified to solve the nuclear fuel management problem and how heuristic information was incorporated. Finally we examine the performance of the EDA on three test problems for the CONSORT reactor, a small research reactor at Imperial College in London, and show how this compares to the performance of a Genetic Algorithm (GA), which is regarded as the best current optimisation algorithm for this problem[24].
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Jiang, S., Carter, J. (2011). Application of Estimation of Distribution Algorithms for Nuclear Fuel Management. In: Köppen, M., Schaefer, G., Abraham, A. (eds) Intelligent Computational Optimization in Engineering. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 366. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21705-0_6
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