Developing architecture for upgrading I&C systems of an operating nuclear power plant using a quality attribute-driven design method

This paper presents the architecture for upgrading the instrumentation and control (I&C) systems of a Korean standard nuclear power plant (KSNP) as an operating nuclear power plant. This paper uses the analysis results of KSNP's I&C systems performed in a previous study. This paper proposes a Preparation–Decision–Design–Assessment (PDDA) process that focuses on quality oriented development, as a cyclical process to develop the architecture. The PDDA was motivated from the practice of architecture-based development used in software engineering fields. In the preparation step of the PDDA, the architecture of digital-based I&C systems was setup for an architectural goal. Single failure criterion and determinism were setup for architectural drivers. In the decision step, defense-in-depth, diversity, redundancy, and independence were determined as architectural tactics to satisfy the single failure criterion, and sequential execution was determined as a tactic to satisfy the determinism. After determining the tactics, the primitive digital-based I&C architecture was determined. In the design step, 17 systems were selected from the KSNP's I&C systems for the upgrade and functionally grouped based on the primitive architecture. The overall architecture was developed to show the deployment of the systems. The detailed architecture of the safety systems was developed by applying a 2-out-of-3 voting logic, and the detailed architecture of the non-safety systems was developed by hot-standby redundancy. While developing the detailed architecture, three ways of signal transmission were determined with proper rationales: hardwire, datalink, and network. In the assessment step, the required network performance, considering the worst-case of data transmission was calculated: the datalink was required by 120 kbps, the safety network by 5 Mbps, and the non-safety network by 60 Mbps. The architecture covered 17 systems out of 22 KSNP's I&C systems. The architecture is implementable with the equipment developed in South Korea. The architecture can be used as a model to upgrade the existing I&C systems in a planned, large-scale, and one-shot manner. A more detailed architecture down to software level will be developed in the future.