Safety Assessment and Risk-informed Design of Networked Control Systems

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Aging and obsolescence of control systems have emerged as a more and more serious problem in multiple industries, including Nuclear Power Plants (NPP). However, both the utilities and regulatory agencies maintain healthy skepticism on any changes of existing engineering systems, if there is a slight uncertainty that the new technology might endanger public safety. Meanwhile, technology advancement in the control field has enabled the emergence of modern control systems, such as Networked Control Systems (NCS). These systems are advantageous in many aspects, such as more flexibility and less maintenance. However, reliability and safety issues have to be adequately addressed before they can be adopted to retrofit existing systems. New design of control systems are also needed to support next generation NPP and other industries. Lack of a systematic reliability and safety assessment program for NCS and design of such systems based on safety insights (risk-informed design) open a unique angle for this research program. There are three short-term objectives: 1) Develop a comprehensive reliability and safety modeling strategy for NCS, especially in safety-critical applications; 2) Perform reliability and safety assessment based on the newly-developed model to extract risk-related information; and 3) Risk-informed design of a benchmark NCS based on insights from the reliability and safety assessment. The long-term objectives beyond the next five years include: 1) Contribute to the development and qualification of next-generation control systems; and 2) Provide technical inputs to policy-making regulatory bodies in the area of control system safety assessment. A research team that encompasses one undergraduate research assistant, two Master students and two Ph.D. students will be established through this research program. They are expected to play a major role in sustaining future development on safety assessment and risk-informed design of NCS.