Hossein Nejatbakhsh Esfahani - Msc. Mechatronics Engineering, University of Tabriz,

Design of control systems for Nuclear Power Plants (NPP’s) is one of the critical and fundamental issues in these types of power plants. Acceptable performance and high availability for a NPP are depended on the configuration of Distributed Control System (DCS) architecture used for implementation of control scenarios. In fact, the network topology of DCS applied to NPP’s is different from another industries and general automatic process control systems. These differences are due to engaging safety principals. Also, we must to regard several principals such as diversity, separation/independence and full redundancy in our hierarchial architecture based on international standards and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recommendations. In this paper we proposed a comprehensive DCS architecture for NPP’s. The proposed architecture is included field, middle and top levels of DCS network that all of the mentioned strategies, related standards and safety principals are applied to it. The proposed DCS system will serve as a platform for further capability in reducing of failures, specially, Common Cause Failure (CCF) and increasing of reliability.

Distributed Control System, Nuclear Power Plant, Diversity, Independence, Common Cause Failure