A Merged-System-Status Monitoring Mechanism in NPP Digital Control System

The digital control system has been wildly applied in nuclear power plant. Being the key safety component in system, Software may lead to software failure and dysfunctional interactions among software and hardware components. The current hardware status monitoring mechanism can’t deal with this new failure mode in a perfect way. This paper applied the STAMP to analysis the failure mode in NPP digital system firstly, take the software, hardware and the interactions as research objects, and propose a new system merged-status monitoring mechanism at last which considers that all status information include software, hardware and the interactions. This mechanism can provide the ability for precaution and a diversity way for system monitoring. It was meaningful for digital control system in nuclear power plant.