Nuclear power plant monitoring and control system software: verification and validation

The design philosophy, configuration, and production of process computer system software used for the monitoring and control of nuclear power plants are presented in detail. To achieve a very complex software system that not only has excellent performance, high reliability, and full fail safe protection, but also is easy to produce, verify, and validate, and has flexibility for future modifications, we developed the following software production system to support safe operation of nuclear power stations. The fundamental design philosophy of our monitoring and control system software is the complete separation of program logic from the data base. The logic section is highly standardized and applicable to a wide range of power generation plant computer application systems. The plant-unique properties and characteristics are all described in the data base. This separation of logic and data base has a dramatic effect on the reliability and productivity of the software system. One of the main features of the data base system is the use of easy-to-learn, easy-to-use, problem-oriented language that enables non-programmers to build up the data base using simple fill-in-the-blank type tables. The generation of these tables is fully automated, and the full set of online table editing utility software, which runs on the target plant process computer, has proven very effective in incorporation of changes and modifications at the site. (author)