Reliability evaluation of communication network switching scheme for safety systems

To develop the communication network architecture of a safety system of nuclear power plant, the five essence in the design requirements of a communication network for safety-critical systems are determined such as status based architecture, deterministic scheme, separation and isolation, high reliability, verification and validation. In this paper, the data communication network switching scheme for safety systems is proposed based on the circuit switched network with time division multiplexing bus technology considered adequate to the essence of the design requirements and the design elements. The proposed communication network switching scheme was applied to the network design of the SMART protection system, and the reliability was evaluated with the data of components failure rates to determine the applicability of the proposed switching scheme. The proposed switching scheme will be applied as basic communication network architecture of safety system