A Review of Recent Dynamic Reliability Analysis Methods and a Proposal for a Smart Component Methodology

Abstract

The next-generation nuclear power plants are designed to have inherent safety features and passive safety systems and use advanced digital instrumentation and control (IC) systems to achieve required operational performance and to meet the safety goals. Digital IC systems often perform complex tasks while interacting with process dynamics. Static reliability methodologies have been shown to be inadequate for modeling and accurately estimating the reliability of such systems due to the lack of close correspondence between the model and the system. Though a number of new dynamic methods have been developed for the reliability evaluation of such systems, they have not reached a stage of maturity, like that of the traditional event tree/fault tree methods. Therefore, an effort is made to review the diverse and recent development in the field, with a view to identify suitable attributes and methods which are necessary for it to be widely adopted and for which a general-purpose software tool could be developed. The qualitative analysis is performed for the attributes among the reviewed methods for comparison and identifying the best method. A qualitative comparison is given for the major attributes. The paper recommends and outlines the development of smart component methodology (SCM) for reliability modeling of dynamic safety systems.