Nuclear Engineering and Technology

Korean Nuclear Society (한국원자력학회)
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Quantitative measures of thoroughness of FBD simulations for PLC-based digital I&C system

  • Received : 2020.02.09
  • Accepted : 2020.06.11
  • Published : 2021.01.25
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Abstract

Simulation is a widely used functional verification method for FBD programs of PLC-based digital I&C system in nuclear power plants. It is difficult, however, to estimate the thoroughness (i.e., effectiveness or quality) of a simulation in the absence of any clear measure for the estimation. This paper proposes two sets of structural coverage adequacy criteria for the FBD simulation, toggle coverage and modified condition/decision coverage, which can estimate the thoroughness of simulation scenarios for FBD programs, as recommended by international standards for functional safety. We developed two supporting tools to generate numerous simulation scenarios and to measure automatically the coverages of the scenarios. The results of our experiment on five FBD programs demonstrated that the measures and tools can help software engineers estimate the thoroughness and improve the simulation scenarios quantitatively.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This paper was supported by Konkuk University in 2017.

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