A Redundancy-Guided Approach for the Hazard Analysis of Digital Instrumentation and Control Systems in Advanced Nuclear Power Plants

Digital instrumentation and control (I&C) upgrades are a vital research area for nuclear industry. Despite their performance benefits, deployment of digital I&C in power plants (NPPs) has been limited. systems exhibit complex failure modes including common cause failures (CCFs) which can be difficult to identify. This paper describes the development redundancy-guided application Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) Fault Tree (FTA) hazard analysis advanced NPPs. The resulting Redundancy-guided System-theoretic Hazard (RESHA) is applied case study representative state-of-the-art reactor trip system. qualitatively systematically identifies most critical CCFs other hazards systems. Ultimately, RESHA help researchers make informed decisions how, what degree, defensive measures such as redundancy, diversity, defense-in-depth used mitigate or eliminate potential