壓水式核電廠的燃料在經過一個週期的使用後，需要替換部分燃料。替換後的爐心需重新設計燃料佈局，使之符合安全規範，並追求最大之經濟效益。以往佈局設計的工作由經驗豐富的工程師完成，近年由於計算機計算快速，可用電腦程式自動設計佈局。本實驗室曾利用蟻群演算法發展自動化佈局程式，可自動設計燃料佈局，但整個過程所耗費之計算時間仍有改進空間，本研究結合蟻群演算法與塔布搜尋法，以達到減少計算時間的目標。
本研究以C語言撰寫自動化程式，在UNIX環境下執行SIMULATE-3模擬爐心狀態及燃耗。燃料佈局的設計先以蟻群演算法自動化佈局程式以二維的SIMULATE-3計算得到粗略的燃料佈局，再藉由塔布方法微調佈局中的燃料位置，滿足設計要求。本研究共使用兩種微調動作：「燃料束位置交換」與「燃料束旋轉」。實驗結果顯示本研究方法可以用較少的時間完成一個燃料佈局的自動化設計。

In a pressurized water reactor (PWR), the fuel assemblies must be reloaded after operating for one and half year, and thus the loading pattern (LP) needs to be redesigned to achieve the longest cycle length and satisfy the safety requirements. The LP design is accomplished by engineers based on their experience. Since the computer capability has been greatly improved, designing the LP by computer become possible. Our laboratory had applied Ant Colony Algorithms to automatically design the LP a couple years ago, but the time effort still need to be improved. In this research, the computational time that the LP design takes can be dramatically reduced by combining Ant Colony Algorithms and Tabu Search (TS).
This research use C language to write the program and simulate the core status by SIMULATE-3 under UNIX environment. There’re two stages to design a LP. First, search a rather good fuel loading pattern using Ant Colony Algorithm and 2D SIMULATE-3 calculation. Second, adjust the loading pattern to fulfill the requirements using Tabu Search. There’re two ways to adjust the LP: one is “swap”, the other is “rotation”. The experimental results show that a loading pattern design can be accomplished automatically within a rather short time.

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