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Quantitative Evaluation of Common Cause Failures in High Safety-significant Safety-related Digital Instrumentation and Control Systems in Nuclear Power Plants

Digital instrumentation and control (DIC) systems at nuclear power plants (NPPs) have many advantages over analog systems. They are proven to be more reliable, cheaper, and easier to maintain given obsolescence of analog components. However, they also pose new engineering and technical challenges, such as possibility of common cause failures (CCFs) unique to digital systems. This paper proposes a Platform for Risk Assessment of DIC (PRADIC) that is developed by Idaho National Laboratory (INL). A methodology for evaluation of software CCFs in high safety-significant safety-related DIC systems of NPPs was developed as part of the framework. The framework integrates three stages of a typical risk assessment, qualitative hazard analysis and quantitative reliability and consequence analyses. The quantified risks compared with respective acceptance criteria provide valuable insights for system architecture alternatives allowing design optimization in terms of risk reduction and cost savings. A comprehensive case study performed to demonstrate the framework capabilities is documented in this paper. Results show that the PRADIC is a powerful tool capable to identify potential digital-based CCFs, estimate their probabilities, and evaluate their impacts on system and plant safety.