Control Improvement of the Reactor Protection System

In this paper an optimal maintenance policy for a Reactor Protection System (RPS) for a nuclear plant was developed. RPS consists of continuously operating sub-systems that were subject to random failures. A block system diagram for RPS had been proposed that facilitates analyzing of individual sub-systems separately. The proposed maintenance policy is the Age Replacement model, which incorporated both corrective and preventive maintenances. A Markov model was used to optimize the preventive maintenance interval of those sub-systems whose failure and repair rates were exponentially distributed. Finally, a sensitivity analysis had been performed and recommendations for maintaining the required RPS availability have been suggested.