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- Reliability Assessment for Digital Systems: Under a Small Business Innovative Research
Contract (SBIR) with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, SoHaR has developed
a tool to quantitatively assess digital system reliability (including software)
based on failure data gathered during test and operation. The approach involves
combining reliability modelling of redundant systems together with data reduction
and statistical analysis of failure data to calculate upper and lower bounds of
reliability and availability.
- Programming Guidelines for High Level Languages Used in Safety Systems: Under a
contract to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, SoHaR has developed a set of
programming guidelines for 6 high level languages that are used (or may be used)
in digital safety systems. The goal of the program is to create guidelines that
can be used by both organizations developing safety related systems and by auditors
participating in the licensing process to evaluate the robustness and safety of
the developed software.
- Fault Tolerant Distributed Reactor Safety and Control System: SoHaR is developing
a fault tolerant safety and control system using a microcomputer network which will
be installed at the Experimental Breeder Reactor Facility (EBR II) in Idaho Falls.
The work is being funded through a U.S. Department of Energy contract awarded in
the highly competitive Small Business Innovative Research program, and has resulted
in the development of enhancements to multitasking operating systems to enable multiple
nodes on a local area network to function as a single fault tolerant distributed
real time control system.
- Nuclear Reactor Control Systems Audits: On behalf of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,
SoHaR has performed audits on both qualified digital control systems and non-qualified
safety parameter display systems for PWRs produced by Westinghouse and Babcock and
Wilcox. Systems for specific plants have also been audited in California, Texas,
Georgia, and Tennessee.
- Guidelines for the Development of Safety Critical Systems: As analog safety systems
for nuclear power installations are being replaced by digital versions the U. S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission, seeing the need for acceptance criteria for these
systems, turned to SoHaR for help in drafting guidelines for design and development,
language selection, software test, and fault tolerance or fault avoidance practices.
- Design Guidelines and Verification and Validation of High Integrity Software: Under
contracts to both the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Electric Power Research
Institute, SoHaR developed design guidelines and verification and validation criteria
for software used in high integrity systems such as reactor shutdown systems or
engineered safeguard systems.
- Advanced Fault Tolerant Reactor Control Systems: Under a separate Department of
Energy SBIR contract, SoHaR is developing the architecture for a fault tolerant
distributed systems for advanced reactor control. The goal of this system is to
develop an architecture which will allow for the insertion of sophisticated (perhaps
AI-based) control functions while retaining a highly verified fault tolerant kernel
system that would detect and recover from faults in the more advanced systems. The
major benefit of the system is to facilitate licensing of advanced control functions
without the need for a stringent (and very expensive) verification and validation
of a large amount of code.
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