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ERIN Engineering and Research, Inc. (ERIN), an SKF Group Company, developed the BART™ software code to perform Bayesian statistical analysis. The BART software program has been successfully used at several utilities to update PRA component failure rates, initiate event frequencies, common cause factors, and maintenance unavailabilities. An underlying understanding of a process, be it component failure rate or initiating event frequency, is updated by the experience observed by the analyst. For example, a client will update a generic failure rate of an operating component by the history of that component observed under its unique operating conditions. The end result, or posterior distribution, will then reflect the component's unique operating experience with an appropriate amount of uncertainty due to the limited experience of the component as compared to experience of the entire population of such components.The BART software supports processes like binomial (time-based) and Poisson (random demand-based) by accepting lognormal input distributions for most applications, and beta distributions for common cause analysis. The BART software common cause module contains an extensive state-of-the-art database for most nuclear power plant components. The BART software allows the analyst to 'update' these generic values with plant-specific data in order to create custom parameters.The most recent version of the BART software product supports batch processing of data -- up to 20 updates at a time through on-screen input tables. For even larger jobs, the software can process a user-provided MS Excel file and perform up to 65,000 updates. The BART™ software code runs on top of MS Excel in Windows 95 (and later), meaning results can quickly be plotted, printed with a single keystroke, and saved to a database for easy export to other PRA software. |
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