Overview of risk assessment in digitalized nuclear power plants

Many of non-safety analog features in nuclear power plants (NPP) are being replaced with digitalized systems to gain advantages in accuracy, computational capability, and data handling. It is difficult however to ensure the safety of digital features because there is, as of yet, no comprehensive reliability quantification method for them. In this overview, preceding studies related to three critical factors in the reliability quantification process, namely detection coverage of fault–tolerant techniques, software reliability, and network communication failure, are introduced and their valuable insights and challenges are described. (author)