Quantification Frameworks and Their Application for Evaluating the Software Quality Factor Using Quality Characteristic Value

Seismic protection systems (SPS) have been developed and used successfully in conventional structures, but their applications in nuclear power plants (NPPs) are scarce. However, valuable research has been conducted worldwide to include SPS in nuclear engineering design. This study aims to provide a state-of-the-art review of SPS in nuclear engineering and to answer four significant research questions: (1) why are SPS not adopted in the nuclear industry and what issues have prevented their deployment? (2) what types of SPS are being considered in nuclear engineering research? (3) what are the strategies for location of SPS within NPPs? and (4) how may SPS provide improved structural performance and safety of NPPs under seismic actions? This review is conducted following the procedures of systematic reviews, where possible.The issues concerning the use of SPS in NPPs are identified: cost, safety, licensing and scarcity of applications. NPPs demand full structural integrity and reactor's safe shutdown during earthquake actions. Therefore, horizontal isolation may be insufficient in active seismic zones and isolation in the vertical direction may be required. Based on the results in this review, it is likely that next generation reactors in seismic zones will include state-of-the-art SPS to achieve full standardised design.

Swarm-based intelligence is a recently developed area of computational intelligence that offers a powerful framework for solving complex optimization problems. It has found applications in various scientific fields where optimization of one or more functions is required. There are several methods developed under the umbrella of swarm intelligence, and particle swarm optimization (PSO) is one of them. This chapter presents swarm intelligence and its applications in industrial engineering as well as nuclear power plants and PSO is used to illustrate the potential of such an implementation. The roadmap of the chapter is as follows: Sec. 9.1 provides an introduction to swarm intelligence and the following section presents particle swarm optimization. A discussion on the implementation of PSO in industrial engineering problems is given in Sec. 9.3 while PSO applications in nuclear power plants (NPP) are presented in Sec. 9.4. Section 9.5 concludes the chapter.

7 - Wireless sensor networks for the monitoring and control of nuclear power plants

Risk monitor riskangel for risk-informed applications in nuclear power plants

The advancements in the technology landscape and software development in recent years mandate paying attention to Software Quality Assurance (SQA) because it is becoming significantly important and complex. SQA is a set of activities within the software development lifecycle that aims at reducing development and testing costs, improving the quality of the software systems, and increasing customer satisfaction. Thus, the objective of this paper is to build a SQA maturity model, particularly in the telecommunication industry. To achieve this, this research identified perspectives and factors based on a comprehensive literature review and experts’ inputs using Hierarchical Decision Modeling (HDM) as the methodology. The proposed model consists of five perspectives, which are requirements validation, testing, software change management control, technology, and organization and culture with every perspective containing relevant factors. The factors and perspectives are validated and quantified using SQA inputs from subject matter experts. The findings of this study suggest that requirements validation is the most important perspective. Two case studies were conducted to identify the maturity score for each case, demonstrate the practicality of the research model, identify areas of deficiencies, and propose corrective actions. This paper provides an in-depth look at software quality factors and their relative importance, targeting to help SQA practitioners understand and assess their SQA practices.

This paper reports the state of the art of using a solid-state Nd:YAG laser for material processing applications such as cutting, welding and drilling of several components of operational nuclear reactors in radioactive environment. We have demonstrated several advantages of laser-based material processing over conventional methods, and these are discussed briefly. At NPCIL, we have used laser techniques to cut stainless steel sheets up to 14 mm thickness and stainless steel weld up to a depth of 3 mm. This remotely operable laser system has been engineered for its robustness with proper fixtures and tooling for various material processing operations on industrial scale.

The ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code Committee (BPVC) has recently published Code Case N-755 that describes the requirements for the use of Polyethylene (PE) pipe for the construction of Section III, Division 1 Class 3 buried piping systems for service water applications in nuclear power plants. The code case was developed by Special Working Group–Polyethylene Pipe (SWG-PP) within Section III (Design) of the BPVC. This paper provides a critical review of the design requirements described in CC N-755 from pressure boundary integrity considerations. The various technical issues that need to be addressed for safety-critical PE piping are discussed in this paper. Specifically, the premise of allowing defects in pipe that are 10% of the wall thickness has been reviewed especially for cases involving large diameter piping [> 304.8 mm (12 inches)] that is to be operated at elevated temperatures as high as 60°C (140°F). One of the common modes of failure in PE piping under sustained internal pressure is due to slow crack growth (SCG) from manufacturing or installation defects in the pipe wall. The effect of pipe diameter and stresses on the crack driving force for a 10% deep flaw is calculated for comparison with the material resistance to SCG at elevated temperatures.

Underwater laser cutting of stainless steel up to 100 mm thick for dismantling application in nuclear power plants

Distributed digital control architecture is being followed for plant data communication and control of final control elements in current and upcoming generation of nuclear power plants. Ethernet communication using TCP/IP protocol plays a key role in interconnecting over 40,000 signals that are geographically distributed across the plant with centralized server and display stations located in main control room. TCP/IP Communication modules are used in each embedded system for sending and receiving digitized data over plant backbone. Offloading TCP/IP communication tasks from the main processor guarantees real time performance for safety critical and safety related applications in nuclear power plant. This approach simplifies software architecture and makes CPU function independent of communication tasks, thereby making overall system dependable & predictable. Design of such TCP/IP communication module for better maintainability, smoother certification and replacement for commercially available module is described in this paper.

Investigation of Cutting Force Tool Tip Temperature and Surface Roughness during Dry Machining of Spring Steel

Interpretable Bayesian-optimized Autoencoder for fault detection and diagnosis with application in nuclear power plants

Quality model is regarded as a well-accepted approach for assessing, managing and improving software product quality. There are three categories of quality models for software products, i.e., definition model, assessment model, and prediction model. Quality assessment model (QAM) is a metric-based approach to assess the software quality. It is typically regarded as of high importance for its clear method on how to assess a system. However, the current state-of-the-art in QAM research is under limited investigation. To address this gap, the paper provides an organized and synthesized summary of the current QAMs. In detail, we conduct a systematic mapping study (SMS) for structuring the relevant articles. We obtain a total of 716 papers from the five databases, and 31 papers are selected as relevant studies at last. In summary, our work focuses on QAMs from the following aspects: software metrics, quality factors, aggregation methods, evaluation methods and tool support. According to the analysis results, our work discovers five needs that researchers in this area should continue to address: (1) new method and criteria to tailor a quality framework (i.e., structure of software metrics and quality factors) according to different specifics, (2) systematic investigations on the effectiveness, strength and weakness of different aggregation methods to guide the method selection in different context, (3) more investigations on evaluating QAMs in the context of industrial cases, (4) further investigations or real-world case studies on the QAMs related tools, and (5) building a public and diverse software benchmark which can be adopted in different application context.

Aims: Software quality assurance is a formal process for evaluating and documenting the quality of the work products during each stage of the software development lifecycle.The practice of applying software metrics to operational factors and to maintain factors is a complex task.Successful software quality assurance is highly dependent on software metrics.It needs linkage the software quality model and software metrics through quality factors in order to offer measure method for software quality assurance.The contributions of this paper build an appropriate method of Software quality metrics application in quality life cycle with software quality assurance.Design: The purpose approach defines some software metrics in the factors and discussed several software quality assurance model and some quality factors measure method.Methodology: This paper solves customer value evaluation problem are: Build a framework of combination of software quality criteria.Describes software metrics.Build Software quality metrics application in quality life cycle with software quality assurance.Results: From the appropriate method of Software quality metrics application in quality life cycle with software quality assurance, each activity in the software life cycle, there is one or more QA quality measure metrics focus on ensuring the quality of the process and the resulting product.Future research is need to extend and improve the methodology to extend metrics that have been validated on one project, using our criteria, valid measures of quality on future software project.

The latest version of programming language Ada, Ada 2012, has introduced the concept of contract-based programming (CBP) and became the first internationally standardized programming language to include CBP as an intrinsic feature of the language. CBP can strictly stipulate and assure the correctness of programs to enhance the reliability and security of safety-critical systems, due to terrible design and/or programming practice, there is an issue that it might obstruct some other factors of the software quality. Therefore, it is essential to implement a supporting environment for CBP with Ada 2012 in order to not only retain reliability by using CBP, but also avoid taking interference to other factors of software quality. Until now, there is no report for proposing supporting environments or tools for CBP, while most studies focus on how to check the conditions of contracts, i.e., what contracts should do for software engineering activities. To support CBP with Ada 2012, this paper analyzes the issues that CBP disturbs some other factors of software quality, proposes methods to avoid the issues, and shows a supporting environment for CBP in Ada 2012 programs.

A novel approach for software reliability analysis of digital instrumentation and control systems in nuclear power plants