Preliminary research of reactor protection system reliability based on Monte Carlo methods

Reactor Protection System (RPS) is one of the most important systems in instrumentation and control systems of Nuclear Power Plants (NPP). Research of RPS reliability is a hot topic in the field of NPP safety and reliability. Since there are lots of equipment in a RPS and there are complex relationships among the equipment, traditional reliability methods, such as fault tree analysis and Markov chain theory, have many limitations in the research of RPS reliability. This paper takes a preliminary research of RPS reliability based on Monte Carlo Methods. To simulate the behavior of every equipment in a RPS, Monte Carlo Method would get system reliability with considering all static and dynamic characters of the RPS. Standard Monte Carlo Method needs huge calculation power to simulate a high reliable system, and we study biased techniques to reduce the variance and improve the simulation efficiency during the research of RPS reliability.