• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.750-759
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• 2004

The software of the nuclear power plant digital control system is a safety-critical system where many techniques must be applied to it in order to preserve safety in the whole system. Formal specifications especially allow the system to be clearly and completely specified in the early requirements specification phase therefore making it a trusted method for increasing safety. In this paper, we discuss the NuSCR, which is a qualified formal specification method for specifying nuclear power plant digital control system software requirements. To investigate the application of NuSCR, we introduce the experience of using NuSCR in formally specifying the plant protection system's software requirements, which is presently being developed at KNICS. Case study that shows that the formal specification approach NuSCR is very much qualified and specialized for the nuclear domain is also shown.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.07c
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• pp.2545-2548
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• 2003

Reliability is the very important issue for nuclear fields. In this paper, an analysis method is suggested to evaluate the level of availability improvement by adding the fault diagnosis function in the control system of Reactor Protection System. The Failure Mode Effect Analysis(FMEA), MIL-HDBK-217F, and Makov modelling techniques are used for availability assessment.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2005.05a
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• pp.81-83
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• 2005

The Reactor Protection System (RPS) is a very important system in a nuclear power plant because the system shuts down the reactor to maintain the reactor core integrity and the reactor coolant system pressure boundary if the plant conditions approach the specified safety limits. This paper describes the unavailability assessment of a digital reactor protection system using the fault tree analysis technique. The fault tree technique can be expressed in terms of combinations of the basic event failures. In this paper, a prediction method of the hardware failure rate is suggested for a digital reactor protection system. and applied to the reactor protection system being developed in Korea.

• Journal of Korea Society of Digital Industry and Information Management
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.39-48
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• 2022

The application of digital technology to instrumentation and control systems in nuclear power plants has overcome many shortcomings of analog technology, but the threat of cybersecurity has increased. Along with other systems, the reactor protection system also uses digital-based equipment, so responding to cybersecurity threats is essential. We generally determine cybersecurity threats according to the role and function of the system. However, since the instrumentation and control system has various systems linked to each other, it is essential to analyze cybersecurity threats together between the connected systems. In this paper, we analyze the cybersecurity threat of the reactor protection system with the associated facilities. To this end, we quantitatively identified the risk of the reactor protection system by considering safety functions, a communication type, the use of analog or digital-based equipment of the associated systems, and the software vulnerability of the configuration module of the reactor protection system.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.185-191
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• 2015

This paper suggest the safety class communication board in order to design the safety network of the nuclear safety class controller. The reactor protection system use the digitized networks because from analog system to digital system. The communication board shall be provided to pass the required performance and test of the safety class in the digital network used in the nuclear safety class. Communication protocol is composed of physical layer(PHY), data link layer(MAC: Medium Access Control), the application layer in the OSI 7 layer only. The data link layer data package for the cyber security has changed. CRC32 were used for data quality and the using one way communication, not requests and not responses for receiving data, does not affect the nuclear safety system. It has been designed in accordance with requirements, design, verification and procedure for the approving the nuclear safety class. For hardware verification such as electromagnetic test, aging test, inspection, burn-in test, seismic test and environmental test in was performed. FPGA firmware to verify compliance with the life-cycle of IEEE 1074 was performed by the component testing and integration testing.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.639-648
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• 2015

SInce 2000, Instrumentation and Control(I&C) systems of Nuclear Power Plant(NPP) based on analog technology began to be applied to the digital technology. NPPs under construction in the country with domestic APR1400 I&C system, most devices were digitalized. Cyber security of NPP I&C systems has emerged as an important issue because digital devices compared to the existing analog equipment are vulnerable to cyber attacks. In this paper, We proposed the risk rating process of cyber security threats in NPP I&C system and applied the proposed process to the Reactor Protection System(RPS) developed through Korea Nuclear Instrumentation & Control System(KINCS) project for evaluating the risk of cyber security threats.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.27 no.6
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• pp.877-887
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• 1995

YGN 3 is the first nuclear power plant to use the Core Protection Calculator (CPC) as the core protection system and the Core Operating Limit Supervisory System (COLSS) as the core monitor-ing system in Korea. The CPC is designed to provide on-line calculations of Departure from Nucleate Boiling Ratio (DNBR) and Local Power Density (LPD) and to initiate reactor trip if the core conditions exceed the DNBR or LPD design limit. The COLSS is designed to assist the operator in implementing the Limiting Conditions for Operation (LCOs) in Technical Specifications for DNBR/Linear Heat Rate (LHR) margin, azimuthal tilt, and axial shape index and to provide alarm when the LCOs are reached. During YGN 3 initial startup testing, extensive CPC/COLSS related tests ore peformed to ver-ify the CPC/COLSS performance and to obtain optimum CPC/COLSS calibration constants at var, -ious core conditions. Most of test results met their specific acceptance criteria. In the case of missing the acceptance criteria, the test results ore analyzed, evaluated, and justified. Through the analysis and evaluation of each of the CPC/COLSS related test results, it can be concluded that the CPC/COLSS are successfully Implemented as designed at YGN 3.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2005.05a
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• pp.84-86
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• 2005

The digital systems such as PLC or DCS have been applied to non-safety systems of nuclear power plants because of many difficulties in using analog systems. Nowadays, digital systems have been applied to safety systems of the plants such as reactor protection system. One of the main advantages of digital systems is applicability of automatic testing methods to the systems. The protection system requires high-reliability and high-availability because it shall minimize the propagation of abnormal or accident conditions of nuclear power plants. The calculation of reliability and availability of systems depends on the maintenance period of the system. In general, the maintenance period of the protection system is one-month in case of the manual test. However, the cycle of test can be shortened in several hours by using automatic periodic testing. The reliability and availability of the system is better when test period is shortened because the reliability and availability is inverse proportion to the test period. In this research, we developed the automatic periodic testing method for KNICS Reactor Protection System, which can test the system automatically without an operator or a tester. The automatic testing contained all functions of reaction protection systems from analog-to-digital conversion function of the bistable Processor to the coincident trip function of the coincident processor. By applying the automatic periodic testing to reaction system, the maintenance cost can be cut down and the reliability can be increased.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.149-161
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• 2008

As Programmable Logic Controllers(PLCs) are frequently used to implement real-time safety critical software, testing of PLC software is getting more important. We propose a structural testing technique on Function Block Diagram(FBD) which is one of the PLC programming languages. In order to test FBD networks, we define templates for function blocks including timer function blocks and propose an algorithm based on the templates to transform a unit FBD into a flowgraph. We generate test cases by applying existing testing techniques to the generated flowgraph. While the existing FBD testing technique do not consider infernal structure of FBD to generate test cases and can be applied only to FBD from which the specific intermediate model can be generated, this approach has advantages of systematic test case generation considering infernal structure of FBD and applicability to any FBD without regard to its intermediate format. Especially, the proposed method enables FBD networks including timer function blocks to be tested thoroughly. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we use trip logic of bistable processor of digital nuclear power plant protection systems which is being developed in Korea.