Performance measurement of safety-critical systems based on ordinary differential equations and Petri nets: A case study of nuclear power plant

Abstract

This article proposes a novel approach to measure the performance of Safety-Critical Systems (SCS). Such systems contain multiple processing nodes that communicate with each other is modeled by a Petri nets (PN). The paper uses the PN for the performance evaluation of SCS. A set of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) is derived from the Petri net model that represent the state of the system, and the solutions can be used to measure the system's performance. The proposed method can avoid the state space explosion problem and also introduces new metrics of performance, along with their measurement: deadlock, liveness, stability, boundedness, and steady state. The proposed technique is applied to Shutdown System (SDS) of Nuclear Power Plant (NPP). We obtained 99.887% accuracy of performance measurement, which proves the effectiveness of our approach.