Hydraulic Dam Safety Assessment with the Timed Observations Theory
Évaluation de la sécurité des barrages hydrauliques basée sur la théorie des observations datées
Résumé
The safety control process of industrial systems (considered to be dynamic systems) needs to take in account physical processes (e.g. building ageing), informational processes (data collection and processing), decisional processes (data aggregation), and has to consider various constraints (e.g. economic and regulatory). The improvement of informational and decisional processes with the aim of controlling physical processes is based on the development of models and algorithms for measurement, assessment, control, diagnosis and prognostic. In the domain of dam management, assessment of reliability and safety, fault diagnosis, and corrective action proposals are carried out by expert engineers during dam reviews. With the perspective to assist these expert engineers, it is of great importance to develop methods and tools to manage the dynamic behaviour of dams and to model the processes at the same level of abstraction that is used by experts. In this chapter, the authors tackle the cognitive process of the diagnosis by means of a formal multi-modelling method and a diagnosis algorithm. The multi-modelling method called Timed Observations Method for Diagnosis (TOM4D) is based on the elaboration of four models: a Structural Model describing the relations between the components of the system, a Functional Model providing the relations between the values of the process variables (i.e. a set of mathematical functions), a Behavioural Model defining the states of the process and the discrete events firing the state transitions, and a Perception Model composed of a set of abstract variables, a set of thresholds associated to these variables and a set of constraints. The resulting process allows the automatic fault detection, identification and diagnosis and it is applied to hydraulic dam safety.