Analysis of a Communication Network for Control Systems in Nuclear Power Plants and a Case Study

In this paper, a real-time communication method using a PICNET-NP(Plant Instrumentation and Control Network for Nuclear Power Plant) is proposed with an analysis of the control network requirements of DCS (Distributed Control System) in nuclear power plants. The method satisfies deadline in case of worst data traffics by considering aperiodic and periodic real-time data and others. In addition, the method was used to analyze the data characteristics of the DCS in existing nuclear power plant. The result shows that use of this method meets the response time requirement(100ms).