Software Diversity in Reactor Protection Systems: An Experment

Abstract Since simple duplication of software does not pay off for increased reliability, a special kind of redundancy has to be used: diversity. This paper illustrates different kinds of software diversity and describes an experiment in which software diversity was applied in a prototype implementation of a reactor protection system. In the course of this implementation the errors were reported and classified. The advantages of diverse programming, concerning the aspect of easier validation of the software, are explained.