Reliability of Smart Instrumentation

This paper gives an overview of a recently completed study undertaken for the UK Nuclear Industry on the Reliability of Smart Instrumentation, that is instrumentation which depends upon digital electronics and computer software for its correct operation. In many critical contexts, high reliability is a requirement which must be justified from an analysis or actual data obtained from use of the device. The methods used to undertake this analysis for hardware, such as FMEA, are not directly applicable to software. Also, software is known to have failure modes and characteristics quite unlike hardware. Hence obtaining suitable reliability data for Smart instrumentation is not straightforward. For the background to this study, see [6]. The information is this paper is published with kind agreement of the companies responsible for the research contract, namely Nuclear Electric Limited, Scottish Nuclear Limited, British Nuclear Fuels Limited and Magnox plc. NPL and Druck Ltd acknowledge these companies support and thank them for their agreement to publish this paper (under contract IMC reference PC/GNSR/5001).