Context and challenges

This nuclear reactor is located on a major nuclear site in France. This reactor was commissioned in 1964, and then operated for about ten years. By decree issued on 17 April 1980, the operator of this site was authorised to re-use this installation to store radioactive substances.

This installation, which does not comply with the current safety requirements for storage facilities, has not received any radioactive substances for storage purposes since 2008. The permanent shutdown of the facility is planned by the end of 2023. The decommissioning file must be sent to the ASN (French Nuclear Safety Authority) before 15 December 2019 in accordance with the Environment Code and the Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection Mission letter (6 July 2018). The facility involves many documents necessary to organise the decommissioning, and the teams are facing difficulties using all of them.

In order to manage the decommissioning operations on this site and boost the efficiency of information management, this client tasked Assystem with implementing a “document to data” approach using the GDI solution (Global Data Inquirer: an Assystem Artificial Intelligence solution to read, understand, and structure the technical archives of complex installations).

Project scope

  • Data conversion and OCRisation (Optical Character Recognition)
  • Automatic generation of a database of the site inventory: buildings, equipment, waste, etc.
  • Setting up a smart query semantic search engine on all input data
  • Generating an ontology and searchable databases of the site inventory: extraction of tables and lists in the documents – Natural Language Processing, reading and understanding text by AI, (Deep Learning)
  • Setting up an “Installation Explorer” web application designed with several features: links between documents, extraction of the field of a document, etc.
  • Detection of duplicate documents and similar documents, and automatic extraction of tables from pdf files
  • Setting up a question & answer chatbot on the input data (AI DL QANet model)

Client benefits

  • Time savings thanks to the indexing and structuring of documents for fast and exhaustive access to information, enabling engineers and technicians to dedicate their time to design and production
  • Extraction of data to perform analyses and feed into simulation or decision-making tools
  • Major time savings for the analysis of decommissioning scenarios
  • The client has high confidence in the data thanks to its reliability and exhaustiveness
  • Decision-making support to decide if any additional studies are needed
  • Possibility of re-using this tool to other facilities in decommissioning phase (same topics, reusable structure)

In figures

  • 48
    GB of input data
  • 20,913
    input documents reduced
    to 14,280 documents
  • 23,134
    tables extracted
  • 7,000
    Questions/Answers
    created for the chatbot

Nuclear: related references

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Digital Twin of a nuclear waste treatment plant

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All our references

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