The software verification and validation process for a PLC-based engineered safety features-component control system in nuclear power plants

This paper introduces the software life-cycle V&V (verification and validation) tasks for the KNICS (Korea nuclear instrumentation and control system) project. The objectives of the V&V tasks are mainly to develop a programmable logic controller (PLC) for safety-critical instrumentation and control (I&C) systems, and then to apply the PLC (called POSAFE-Q) to developing the prototype of an engineered safety features-component control system (ESF-CCS) in nuclear power plants. As preparative works for the software V&V, various kinds of software plans and V&V task procedures have been developed according to the software life-cycle management. A number of software V&V tools have been adopted or developed to efficiently support the V&V tasks. The V&V techniques employed in this work include a checklist-based review and inspection, a requirement traceability analysis, formal verification, and life-cycle based software testing.