Performance evaluation of safety-critical systems of nuclear power plant systems

Abstract

The complexity of safety critical systems of Nuclear Power Plant continues to increase rapidly due its transition from analog to digital systems. It has thus become progressively more imperative to model these systems prior to their implementation in order to meet the high performance, safety and reliability requirements. Timed Petri Nets (TPNs) have been widely used to model such systems for non-functional analysis. The paper presents a novel methodology for the analysis of the performance metrics using PN modeling. The paper uses the isomorphism property of the TPNs and the Markov chains for the performance analysis of the safety critical systems. The presented methodology has been validated on a Shutdown System of a Nuclear Power Plant. Keywords: Performance, Safety critical systems, Petri nets, Markov chain