The software V&V tasks for a safety-critical software based protection system in nuclear power plants

This paper introduces the software life-cycle based 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 the programmable logic controller (PLC) for safety-critical instrumentation and control (I&C) systems, and then to apply the PLC to developing the prototype of the safety-critical software based digital protection system 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 a software life-cycle management. A number of software V&V tools have been adopted or developed to support the V&V tasks. The V&V techniques employed in this work include a checklist-based review and inspection, the requirement traceability analysis, a formal specification and verification, a lifecycle based software testing, a software safety analysis, and a software configuration management.