FUELCON'S heuristics, their rationale, and their representations

The FUELCON expert system makes computations for reactor core reload design more transparent, in several ways. First, the heuristics in its ruleset reflect a highlevel abstraction of the human expert's operational knowledge; a few mandatory rules are mandated by safety considerations, whereas a few other rules embody a particular strategy of search. Second, FUELCON does not just look for one satisfactory solution. It generates a multitude of candidate configurations, resulting by the search policy embodied in the ruleset. Once these solutions are visualized as dot in the bidimensional plane of cycle length and power peak, not only this enables the user to pick the few most promising solutions for further consideration, but the domain expert qua user of FUELCON can revise the ruleset to emphasize a trend he spotted in the visualization and would like to explore. Ruleset revisions enable "zooming" on subregions of the search space. An ergonomic methodology of how to best use FUELCON eventually came into existence.