Development of a computerized risk management system for international NPP EPC projects

Abstract

Over the past decade, Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) projects have been increasingly forced to cope with potential risks, which seriously impacted achieving the target completion time and cost. NPP projects have frequently exceeded the planned time and cost despite reliable estimates at the start of the project. This was attributed to unpredictable causes at the beginning and to shortage of proper tools to quantitatively analyze the inevitable uncertainties. To overcome these difficulties, computerized systems have been widely proposed in the construction industry as effective aids to proactively control the potential risks and to monitor continuously their status and variation. However, there are few risk management systems focused on NPP projects. In this study, we developed a computer-based risk management system for NPP projects, called Nuclear Risk Management System (NuRMS), which is helpful for furnishing project managers with warning signals as a project is progressing and for tracking the changes in risk variation at a desired confidence level. In developing the NuRMS, the Risk Breakdown Structure (RBS), the weights for risk categorization, computation of the Total Risk Score (TRS), and integration of risk analysis tools with relation-based and cost-loaded activity schedule were core tasks. To demonstrate the efficiency of the developed NuRMS, the system was operated using risk information derived from constructing the auxiliary buildings of Shin-Kori units 3 and 4 located in Korea, as an illustrative case. The results showed the system's capacities and suggested that it may be applied to a real NPP engineering, procurement, and construction project. The developed NuRMS is expected to assist a project manager in monitoring, tracking, and controlling potential impacts of risk events during the overall implementation of NPP projects.