Facility Deployment Decisions through Warp Optimizaton of Regressed Gaussian Processes
This provides a fast, in-situ method for optimizing facility deployment in low-fidelity fuel cycle simulators, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing regression and warping techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of determining deployment schedules for facilities to meet fuel cycle demand by using Gaussian process regression and dynamic time warping to optimize schedules, converging within 5-10 iterations to a distance less than 1% of total deployable production.
A method for quickly determining deployment schedules that meet a given fuel cycle demand is presented here. This algorithm is fast enough to perform in situ within low-fidelity fuel cycle simulators. It uses Gaussian process regression models to predict the production curve as a function of time and the number of deployed facilities. Each of these predictions is measured against the demand curve using the dynamic time warping distance. The minimum distance deployment schedule is evaluated in a full fuel cycle simulation, whose generated production curve then informs the model on the next optimization iteration. The method converges within five to ten iterations to a distance that is less than one percent of the total deployable production. A representative once-through fuel cycle is used to demonstrate the methodology for reactor deployment.