Abstract
This paper presents development of an automatic fault diagnosis system in the nuclear power plants to minimise the possible nuclear disasters caused by inaccurate diagnoses done by operators. Combined binary and decimal coding methods are employed in this work based on Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBFNN) structure. This underlying RBFNN structure is further trained through genetic optimisation algorithm based on known frequent failure conditions from a nuclear power plant’s condensation and feed-water system. It is found that the proposed Genetic-RBFNN (GRBFNN) method not only makes the original neural network smaller in terms of computation and realisation but also improves the diagnosis speed and accuracy. © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.