|
BURLINGTON, Mass., Feb. 20, 2004 -- Gensym Corp., a provider of software and services for expert operations management, today announced that TEPCO Systems Corporation, the systems integration subsidiary of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), is expanding its use of Gensym's G2® expert system software with a solution that enhances the reliability and safety of electric generation plants.
TEPCO Systems' solution, FT-Free, analyzes power plant reliability and safety by automating a technique known as Probabilistic Safety Analysis (PSA), which enables engineers to assess the probability and consequences of potential plant safety-related problems through the use of fault-tree diagrams.
PSA is used in industries, such as nuclear power, chemical, and aerospace, to assess the safety of new and modified installations. TEPCO Systems has successfully deployed FT-Free within a TEPCO nuclear power plant facility, is expanding its use within TEPCO, and is now marketing it to the electric utility industry.
Enhancing plant reliability and safety within TEPCO
TEPCO, Japan's largest electric utility, serves over 27 million customers in the Tokyo metropolitan region and generates over $40 billion in annual revenue. Like many electric power companies throughout the world, TEPCO is being challenged to increase efficiency throughout its business.
TEPCO's plant safety engineers can more efficiently make their assessments using FT-Free because it automatically creates PSA fault-tree models that represent potential failure modes for critical plant processes. From a model, engineers apply FT-Free's built-in expertise to quickly assess the risks of various types of problems that can adversely impact plant reliability and safety.
Through this assessment, engineers drive critical decisions about a plant's process configuration and its operational safety procedures.
FT-Free enables engineers to complete an analysis much faster than manual methods and ensures greater levels of consistency from one analysis to another. For example, a safety engineer can complete a fault-tree analysis in minutes with FT-Free's automatic generation function while a safety engineer doing that same analysis manually requires days or even weeks to achieve similar results.
A consistent result will be reached independent of which engineer is providing the analysis. This enables TEPCO to best utilize its safety engineers, each of whom typically requires one year of specialized training to be qualified to complete a PSA.
"We chose G2 as the platform for FT-Free because of G2's unique abilities to intuitively capture process engineering knowledge using such techniques as connectable object models and rule-based logic," said Koichi Miyata, a project manager with TEPCO Systems. "The result is that we created a solution that greatly reduces the time and effort it takes to make important plant decisions and that is broadly applicable across industries in which safety analysis is critical."
Gensym partners team to build solution
FT-Free was built by TEPCO Systems Corporation in conjunction with their research partner Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and with Gensym partner Itochu Techno-Science Corporation (CTC). CTC is one of the largest IT solution providers in Japan.
"CTC believes that expertise-based modeling, such as enabled by G2 for TEPCO System's FT-Free solution, has emerged as an important information technology for improving the quality of operational decisions," said Mitsunori Toyoda, a deputy general manager with CTC. "We look forward to working with TEPCO Systems as they extend their investment in this technology."
"We are pleased that TEPCO Systems has selected our software for enhancing the analysis of power plant operations," said Lowell Hawkinson, chairman, president, and CEO of Gensym. "This is another strong example of how partners, such as this combination of TEPCO Systems, Mitsubishi, and CTC, play an important role in delivering G2 solutions to end users. We look forward to TEPCO Systems' future deployments of our technology."
About Gensym Corporation
Gensym Corporation (www.gensym.com) is a provider of software products and services that enable organizations to automate aspects of their operations that have historically required the direct attention of human experts. Gensym's product and service offerings are all based on or relate to Gensym's flagship product G2, which can emulate the reasoning of human experts as they assess, diagnose, and respond to unusual operating situations or as they seek to optimize operations.
| 
Articles 
| View all PennWell sites | View all PennWell events
Add RSS Feed
