A Distributed Fault Tolerant Architecture for Nuclear Reactor Control and Safety Functions

A new fault tolerant architecture that provides tolerance to a broad scope of hardware, software, and communications faults is being developed. This architecture relies on widely commercially available operating systems, local area networks, and software standards. Thus, development time is significantly shortened, and modularity allows for continuous and inexpensive system enhancement throughout the expected 20-year life. The fault containment and parallel processing capabilities of computers network are being exploited to provide a high performance, high availability network capable of tolerating a broad scope of hardware, software, and operating system faults. The system can tolerate all but one known (and avoidable) single fault, two known and avoidable dual faults, and will detect all higher order fault sequences and provide diagnostics to allow for rapid manual recovery.