Software-based fault-tolerant control design for improved power plant operation

The use of fault-tolerance has increasingly become an important requirement for power plant control because of safety and availability considerations. Typical applications in process control employ redundant hardware for data acquisition and processing. The primary objective is to maintain the operation of the plant, even in the presence of anomalies in instrument channels. The performance of a system with existing hardware can be improved by the additional design of diverse, digital control systems in the form of software redundancy. This design has been integrated with signal and command validation with option for manual and automatic control through a graphical user interface. The fault-tolerant design has been demonstrated with application to the steam generator system control in a pressurized water reactor plant