Verification and validation of HPD-based nuclear power plant distributed control system

Verification and validation (V&V) process is one of the critical issues for the application and license of the safety class distributed control system (DCS) in nuclear power plants (NPPs). The application of hardware description language programmable devices (HPDs) technology in NPP safety class DCS has introduced new regulatory issues. In this paper, preliminary analyses of overseas V&V regulations and IEEE standards are presented. Based on IEEE 1012-2012 standard, combined with the specific characteristics of HPDs, the whole life cycle V&V tasks and methods for HPDs system are detailed. The HPDs technology based safety DCS system regulation proposals are also provided. (authors)