Reliability and Performance Measurement of Safety-Critical Systems Based on Petri Nets: A Case Study of Nuclear Power Plant

• Published in: IEEE transactions on reliability Vol. 72; no. 4; pp. 1523 - 1539
• Main Authors: Jyotish, Nand Kumar, Singh, Lalit Kumar, Kumar, Chiranjeev, Singh, Pooja
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.12.2023; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Case studies; Difference equations; Differential equations; Latency time; Markov chain; Markov processes; Mathematical models; Measurement; Nuclear power plants; Nuclear safety; ordinary differential equation (ODE); Ordinary differential equations; Performance evaluation; Performance measurement; Petri nets; Petri nets (PN); Reliability; Safety; Safety critical; safety-critical systems (SCSs); System dynamics; Throughput; Unified modeling language; Vehicle dynamics
• ISSN: 0018-9529; 1558-1721
• DOI: 10.1109/TR.2023.3244365

Safety-critical systems (SCSs) mitigate the risk of catastrophic loss of assets and hence do have high dependability targets. Performance and reliability are the critical dependability attributes, particularly in control and safety systems, and hence essential to measure to ensure the dependability. Traditional methods either are not capable to capture the system dynamics or encounter state explosion problem. Also, the methods are not able to measure all critical performance attributes. This article proposes a novel approach to measure the performance and reliability of SCSs. Such systems contain multiple interconnecting processing nodes, the functional requirements of which are modeled using Petri net (PN). A set of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) is derived from the PN model that represents the state of the system. The ODE solution can be used to measure the critical performance attributes, such as latency time and throughput of the system. The proposed method can avoid the state explosion problem and also introduces new metrics of performance, along with their measurement: deadlock, liveness, stability, boundedness, and steady state. The proposed technique is applied to a case study of nuclear power plant. We obtained 99.887% and 99.939% accuracy of performance and reliability measurement, respectively, which proves the effectiveness of our approach.