GEH and GE Digital Introduce OPA Solution for Nuclear Plant Operators

GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) and GE Digital today 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.

“Built upon our decades of outage experience combined with the software expertise of GE Digital, the OPA solution will deliver additional value for our industry by minimizing outage duration and costs,” said David Sledzik, Senior Vice President of Plant Solutions for GEH. “This digital solution is part of our portfolio of product offerings designed to help transform the installed base through innovation.”

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 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 them millions of dollars per outage by enabling them to create the best plan and execute on time.

“We’re excited to make OPA a valued part of our software portfolio,” said Linda Rae, General Manager for GE Digital’s Power Generation and Oil & Gas business. “Optimizing outage planning can deliver significant customer savings and adds an important new dimension in helping our customers maximize the performance of their assets, operations and people.”

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 risk and actions to optimize scheduling. OPA is also designed to be used during the execution of outages to monitor task performance using advanced analytics to improve decision making. The solution is deployed in an export control compliant platform.