RESEARCH INFORMATION LETTER 1101: Technical basis to review hazard analysis of digital safety systems

Research information letter (RIL)-1101 provides the technical basis to support evaluation of hazard analysis (HA) performed on a digital safety system for use in a nuclear power plant (NPP).

Digital safety systems are becoming more difficult to analyze, due to many factors, such as increasing inter-connectivity, rapid changes in the nature of systems and the underlying technologies, resulting shortening of accumulated experience for a certain class of systems and the associated technologies, declining supply and replenishment of requisite competence, longer less track-able supply chains, and inadequate quality of cross-organizational cross-disciplinary communications, etc.

These trends are not unique to the NPP application domain and pose broader societal concerns.

In the interest of identifying and pursuing common interests, visitors to www.cps-vo.org, including those from non-NPP application domains, are invited to review RIL-1101 from the perspective of their diverse experiences and share their observations in the input-fields under the "Post new comment" title below on this page. Comments most beneficial would identify commonalities in the issues that the reader has experienced and, in the (contributory) hazard scenarios or clusters of scenarios that the reader has encountered. Furthermore, readers are invited to identify further R&D needed to advance our common interest in reducing these hazard spaces, e.g.: refining the conditions that reduce these hazard spaces so that these are consistently measurable; better organization of existing (cause-effect) knowledge; gaps in the knowledge needed to control (or eliminate) the hazard spaces.