• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.62 no.1
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• pp.109-119
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• 2013

This paper presents the design of the Safety Programmable Logic Controller (SPLC) used in the Nuclear Power Plants, an analysis of a reliability for the SPLC using a markov model. The architecture of the SPLC is designed to have the multiple modular redundancy composed of the Dual Modular Redundancy(DMR) and the Triple Modular Redundancy(TMR). The operating system of the SPLC is designed to have the non-preemptive state based scheduler and the supervisory task managing the sequential scheduling, timing of tasks, diagnostic and security. The data communication of the SPLC is designed to have the deterministic state based protocol, and is designed to satisfy the effective transmission capacity of 20Mbps. Using Markov model, the reliability of SPLC is analyzed, and assessed. To have the reasonable reliability such as the mean time to failure (MTTF) more than 10,000 hours, the failure rate of each SPLC module should be less than $2{\times}10^{-5}$/hour. When the fault coverage factor (FCF) is increased by 0.1, the MTTF is improved by about 4 months, thus to enhance the MTTF effectively, it is needed that the diagnostic ability of each SPLC module should be strengthened. Also as the result of comparison the SPLC and the existing safety grade PLCs, the reliability and MTTF of SPLC is up to 1.6-times and up to 22,000 hours better than the existing PLCs.