Control-Room Decision Support

Software that helps operators understand plant state and choose actions, without taking safety-critical control away from hard interlocks.

The role

A control room presents an operator with more data than a person can integrate in real time. Decision support software fuses those streams into a clear picture of plant state, highlights what is drifting, projects likely near-term evolution, and suggests options. It augments human judgment; it does not replace the automatic safety systems that act without waiting for anyone.

What good decision support does

• Summarizes many signals into a small number of meaningful indicators
• Explains its reasoning so the operator can agree or override
• Ranks recommended actions with their expected effects
• Shows uncertainty rather than false precision
• Degrades gracefully: when unsure, it says so

The autonomy boundary

Safety-critical protection belongs to deterministic interlocks and hard limits that fire regardless of what any model believes. Decision support operates above that layer, in the space of judgment and optimization, where a wrong suggestion is caught by a human and by the interlocks beneath it. Keeping this boundary explicit is a design principle, not a limitation to be engineered away.

Trust and explainability

Operators will use a tool only if they understand and trust it. A recommendation that cannot be explained is a recommendation that will be ignored in the moment it matters. So decision support favors transparent reasoning and shows the evidence behind each suggestion, even at some cost in sophistication.

python

def recommend(state, options, model):
    scored = [(o, *model.predict(state, o)) for o in options]  # value, uncertainty
    scored.sort(key=lambda s: (-s[1], s[2]))
    return [{'action':o,'why':model.explain(state,o)} for o,_,_ in scored]

Kronos framing

In the design phase these tools are developed against the digital twin and simulated scenarios, so operators can train and the software can be tuned long before the breeder operates. Construction begins in the second quarter of 2027.