Experimental approach to evaluate software reliability in hardware-software integrated environment

Reliability in safety-critical systems and equipment is of vital importance, so the probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) has been widely used for many years in the nuclear industry to address reliability in a quantitative manner. As many nuclear power plants (NPPs) become digitalized, evaluating the reliability of safety-critical software has become an emerging issue. Due to a lack of available methods, in many conventional PSA models only hardware reliability is addressed with the assumption that software reliability is perfect or very high compared to hardware reliability. This study focused on developing a new method of safety-critical software reliability quantification, derived from hardware-software integrated environment testing. Since the complexity of hardware and software interaction makes the possible number of test cases for exhaustive testing well beyond a practically achievable range, an importance-oriented testing method that assures the most efficient test coverage was developed. Application to the test of an actual NPP reactor protection system demonstrated the applicability of the developed method and provided insight into complex software-based system reliability.