Decision making for active and passive safety systems alternative: Preliminary assessment

In this paper a decision-making framework for comparative assessment of active vs passive safety systems, for Decay Heat Removal (DHR), is proposed, based upon a definite set of criteria. A Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methodological process, based on Multi Attribute Value Theory (MAVT), is adopted for building a multi-criteria evaluation model. A multiple-stage model building process is followed and the Simple Multi Attribute Rating Techniques (SMART) is applied, to capture the decision-makers' concerns for assessing the values of the options, i.e. scoring the assumed criteria, assigning relative weights of importance to the criteria and combining scores and weight. Subjective judgement is used to deal with the measurement of qualitative criteria and the pair wise criteria comparison of alternatives approach is assumed. Overall, the combination of these MCDA modelling techniques provides a new framework enabling the comprehensive measurement of assessment in a structured way, as a decision-support tool for evaluators of innovative systems to be implemented in advanced reactor designs