description
- The ongoing nuclear renaissance means the construction of new nuclear power units, and the upgrade for lifetime extension of existing units. The reliability and safety of the computer-based systems that implement safety functions is a critical issue, in particular due to the fact that software can usually not be proven to be completely defect-free. The differences in current safety justification principles and methods in the EU and China hinder the emergence of widely accepted best practices. They also prevent cost sharing and unnecessarily increase licensing uncertainties. The objective of the HARMONICS project is to ensure that the nuclear industry has well founded and up-to-date methods and data for assessing software of safety systems of Gen-II and Gen-III nuclear power plants. HARMONICS will propose a more systematic and consistent, yet realistic and practical, approach for the software assessment. The approach will address the complete software and system lifecycle, from requirements specification to architectural and detailed design, development, testing, use and maintenance. HARMONICS will be the result of a close co-operation between the EU and China. In addition to the core project team, a larger advisory and end user group will be constituted with other interested stakeholders to review and give feedback on the project work. The project should foster an international consensus based on a sound scientific and technical approach, and provide a good basis for harmonisation. The main steps of the project are - Clarification of needs, practices and experiences in the EU and China. - Development of common approaches to the assessment and justification of the reliability of safety-critical software taking advantage from experience from the recent licensing processes and research projects. - Test of the approaches in case studies. - Assessment of results from the case studies. - Dissemination of results via end users workshops.