Complexity reduction of the Engineered Safety Features Component Control System

Abstract

A complexity reduction methodology for the ESF-CCS (Engineered Safety Features- Component Control System) based on system analysis is developed in this work. The primary objective of this work is to demonstrate that the adoption of an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based architecture results in a decrease in the system complexity. The concepts of complexity and complexity metrics, as well as the ways in which the FPGA platform can result in a decrease in complexity, are defined. Following this, an analysis of the ESF-CCS is performed. The sources of complexity are identified and the system complexity is measured using McCabe’s cyclomatic complexity metric. An FPGA-based design with reduced complexity is then presented. The reduction in complexity is achieved by the use of flat hardware logic, System on Chip architecture, and the separation of logically independent functions. By adopting an FPGA architecture, the control logic can be reduced to around a half. This reduction in complexity results in systems with higher reliability, which are easier to test and maintain.