GE Hitachi and GE Digital Introduce Outage Planning and Analytics Solution for Nuclear Plant Operators

GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) and GE Digital announced the introduction of Outage Planning and Analytics (OPA), a digital solution to help nuclear power plant operators plan, schedule, and execute maintenance and refueling outages. The application was developed by GEH and GE Digital to help plant operators evaluate schedule status, track activities, estimate impacts, and improve decision-making.

The OPA solution is built on GE Digital’s Predix Platform and is currently available to U.S. operators of both boiling water reactors (BWRs) and pressurized water reactors (PWRs). GE continues to enhance OPA to better meet the needs of customers in the nuclear energy industry as well as offering the product to customers in other industries. 

Planned outages for refueling and maintenance activities are a regular part of the operations cycle of nuclear plants. The task is complex and may involve months of planning, thousands of activities and decisions and hundreds of employees and contractors. Outage durations can vary significantly, and schedule overages are common. OPA was created to help operators address the need for better planning and execution and was developed to potentially save millions of dollars per outage by enabling operators to create the best appropriate plan and execute on time.

OPA’s planning features are designed to help plant operators assess outage readiness and can be used at the beginning of the outage planning cycle. Scheduling analytics are used in advance of an outage to identify potential schedule risks and actions to better optimize scheduling. OPA is also designed to be used during the execution of outages to monitor task performance using advanced analytics to help improve decision making. The solution is deployed in an export control compliant platform.