Abstract
Model checking is a formal method that has proven useful for verifying e.g. logic designs of safety systems used in nuclear plants. However, redundant subsystems are implemented in nuclear plants in order to achieve a certain level of fault-tolerance. A formal system-level analysis that takes into account both the detailed logic design of the systems and the potential failures of the hardware equipment is a difficult challenge. In this work, we have created new methodology for modelling hardware failures, and used it to enable the verification of the fault-tolerance of the plant using model checking. We have used an example probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) model of a fictional nuclear power plant as reference and created a corresponding model checking model that covers several safety systems of the plant. Using the plant-level model we verified several safety properties of the nuclear plant. We also analysed the fault-tolerance of the plant with regard to these properties, and used abstraction techniques to manage the large plant-level model. Our work is a step towards being able to exhaustively verify properties on a single model that covers the entire plant. The developed methodology follows closely the notations of PRA analysis, and serves as a basis for further integration between the two approaches.
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Lahtinen, J. (2014). Verification of Fault-Tolerant System Architectures Using Model Checking. In: Bondavalli, A., Ceccarelli, A., Ortmeier, F. (eds) Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security. SAFECOMP 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8696. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10557-4_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10557-4_23
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