- Author
- Hulme, B. L. | Slater, P. J.
- Title
- Boolean Algebraic Analysis of Fire Protection.
- Coporate
- Sandia National Labs., Albuquerque, NM Alabama Univ., Huntsville, AL
- Sponsor
- Department of Energy, Washington, DC
- Report
- SAND 82-0583C; CONF-820467-1, 1982, 16 p.
- Distribution
- Available from National Technical Information Service
- Contract
- DE-AC04-76DP00789
- Keywords
- fire protection | computation | equipment | costs
- Abstract
- In a complex facility the destruction by fire of certain critical combinations of equipment can have potentially disastrous consequences. For example, loss of the equipment that provides cooling for the core of a nuclear reactor power plant could lead to a core meltdown and a possible release of radioactive material. This paper describes a computational procedure which can be used to find minimum cost ways to protect the critical combinations of equipment from a single-source fire by protecting certain areas and strengthening certain barriers against fire. The procedure yields a complete set of optimum solutions by iteratively computing upper and lower bounds on the minimum cost. The fire protection sets evolve from Boolean algebraic computations which obtain minimum cost blocking sets associated with the lower bounds while the upper bounds are produced by maxflow-mincut calculations in a network.