Design, implementation and V&V of a Stepwise Shutdown System: Work in progress description of a case study in HARMONICS EU FP7 project

The safety and reliability are critical issues for the modernisation and construction of computer based systems in nuclear power plants. The EU FP7 project HARMONICS (Harmonised Assessment of Reliability of Modern Nuclear I&C Software) aims to ensure that the nuclear industry has well founded and up-to-date methods and data for assessing software of computer-based safety systems and to harmonise the safety justification principles and methods between different countries. One part of the project is to develop case studies that are used to confirm that the available methods and tools can be applied with success to real systems and software. The Stepwise Shutdown System (SSS) introduced in this paper is an illustrative public example that can be used to show-case and disseminate the results of the project. The system development and the application of various verification and validation (V&V) methods are presented. The work with the case study is still in progress so this paper presents the intermediate results and complements the other HARMONICS paper presented in the EHPG 2013.