Digital I&amp;C systems have been widely applied to reactor control systems from 1990 in Japanese PWR plants. Based on excellent performance of these applications, digital protection systems (including reactor protection systems, emergency safety features actuation systems, and manual safety components control systems) have been developed from 2000 and applied to Japanese PWR plants from 2009. The digital protection systems (DPS) can ensure defense-in-depth and diversity for plant safety and control with applying consequent countermeasures against software common-cause failures. To enhance the reliability of the DPS and the dependability of their software used in the systems, design and quality assurance aspects were considered throughout the development, design, verification, validation, tests and implementation phase of the systems. Verification and validation (V&amp;V) activities are one of key issues to enhance software dependability to assure and to provide traceable proof for that the completed systems meet all requirements including regulatory requirements. Requirements of V&amp;V activities for DPS are described in the Japanese guidance (JEAG 4609) and the IEC standard (IEC 60880), etc. However, detail of the V&amp;V activities and procedures are not specified in those standards because of variation of software architectures of the DPS. V&amp;V plan for the DPS, including activities and procedures, have been developed for Japanese plants and continuously upgraded based on the application experiences considering efficiency in actual works, as a standard V&amp;V plan. The standard V&amp;V plan has been applied for Japanese PWR plants, but also for Chinese PWR plants. The standard V&amp;V plan will be applicable commonly for V&amp;V activities for DPS for nuclear power plants.&nbsp; 
This article provides main features of the standard V&amp;V plan for the DPS with compatibility to international standards, and lessons learned.Keyword 
digital protection systems; software dependability; software life cycle process; V&amp;V

Development of Standard Software Verification and Validation Plan to Enhance Software Dependability for Digital Protection Systems

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/ICONE/ICONE28/volume/85246

2021 28th International Conference on Nuclear Engineering (ICONE28)

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