A modular and parametric structure for the substitution redesign of power plants control systems

Abstract

The modernisation of the control systems in high-risk industrial environments presents a number of difficulties with regard to the reliability and security of the new implementation and especially with regard to the validation of the design and substitution process. In the particular case of a nuclear power plant, the specification of the original design is often not available, adding a further difficulty to the redesign process. In the context of system modernisation, the use of new implementation technologies enables learning possibilities to be incorporated in the redesigned systems. In this article we describe how to tackle the problem of the substitution of such control systems using a modular parametric architecture and we discuss the advantages of such an approach. We present, in generic form, how to approach the substitution of analogue control systems using this modular parametric architecture. We then apply this method to the particular case of the substitution of the system controlling the feed water circuit in a nuclear power plant and we give the experimental results for our implementation.