Introduction
There is very little guidance to nuclear new builds when it comes to standards with regards to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) or Operations Technology (OT). In the traditional business function areas of Operations, Maintenance, Engineering and Work Management we can find well documented guidelines and literature to assist with startups.
The industry has done well to focus on these traditional functional areas. The modern nuclear plant is entirely controlled through software from its operational control, plant as well as computerized maintenance management systems and its auxiliary or support software for analytics and reporting.
The industry knows what good looks like and basically what can be expected through the first operating fuel cycle until the first major Outage (Shutdown for Refueling). However, when it comes to the ICT and OT side of the business we are in unknown territory. This is a free for all. Plants do very little to change or modify the existing systems and components as delivered. Yet, when it comes to the software, it seems that there is plenty to learn and adopt. One such issue is the high occurrence of support incident reporting for faults and issues ranging from password resets, lack of application knowledge, inexperience in adapting to known business processes and big enhancement requests to new software procurement. This is a very big concern and there is a need for further research within this area. This paper aims to address some of the key areas of concern as well as address some of the known issues.
Existing process
Users can create a support ticket (online service request) for any ICT or OT related item linked to any application and or service. The ICT scope of service is linked to mostly corporate applications and related services and the OT scope of supply is linked to applications and services linked to those applications used within the plant power block by the Operations, Maintenance, Engineering and Work Management teams and their supports.
Support tickets are raised for example to assist with user access, application faults and errors and in a broader aspect for system or application enhancements. These range from small additions of a field or major enhancements where entire screens need to be developed.
The Problem identification
The problem as identified by the OT team and its users were a high number of unresolved support and enhancement tickets as presented in the proposal.
These were attributed to:
- Issues that were not addressed with the necessary priority.
- Additional support requirements from users.
Context:
The context of the situation was that the impact was mostly affecting the users in a multi-cultural, multi-national nuclear plant using an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework, Service Management standard based on the version 3 requirements.
The current business process can be detailed as shown below.
Figure 1: The Business Process Model currently in use.
The business process currently in use considers international best practice standards from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations and the World Association of Nuclear Operators. The standards form the benchmark guideline documents for ensuring that all nuclear plants follow the same guidelines. These guideline documents can then be used to formulate the high-level Information Management System (IMS) documents used by a company. The IMS can then in turn be utilized to formulate lower-level process documents within the various functional control areas which can then be used to write working procedures. Working procedures are normally used to execute tasks. By following a set procedure, we ensure consistency and safety is maintained. Charles(2011) showed how Business Process Management were successfully utilized to detail the complicated sub-processes to bring various stakeholders together. Configuration management is maintained in this way. It is not allowed to change the software without a change in documentation first.
Parnas(1991) explains Defense-in-depth (a nuclear industry philosophy of redundancy in place for safety systems) through the “Triple redundancy approach” so that the safety considerations regarding critical software are understood. Through these carefully crafted documents various safety considerations are detailed which enable software to be used to implement these processes. One example of software used to implement a process is in the area of Radiation Protection. The guideline documents detail that workers should be trained prior to providing them access to the controlled radiological zones. To this end, System Applications and Products (SAP), software is used as an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool that facilitates the implementation of this requirement and the integration of SAP with the on-site Training portal allows this requirement to be met. If the software is changed to remove this requirement, then we are essentially in contravention of international best practice standards. The reason for this example is to show that software changes or enhancements in this industry should always be evaluated and the safety impacts considered to ensure compliance and configuration management of the governing process as depicted in Figure 1. Coglianese(2010) clarifies this governing process in their fourfold framework for self-regulation which is what this process entails.
Further to setting the scene and providing proper context is the skills and expertise required from OT Teams today. Traditional ICT staff do not have the skills and expertise to deal with the requirements and safety considerations coming from the Functional Control areas. Parnas(1991) underpins this requirement by illustrating the safety critical software requirements and the standards they should comply too. To further understand an enhancement from a Reactor Engineering team as an example; a Functional Consultant must understand the Reactor Fuel Cycle, the various aspects of the Fuel Management and have a full grasp of the new regulatory- and international requirements related to Fuel as well as how they are integrated with other software modules.
This requires that the OT Team member must understand the business or functional area under his control as well. The OT Team should essentially be very experienced and nuclear skilled themselves. New Nuclear Build programs are Digital in nature and therefore very labour intensive from a software point of view. Essentially there was a shift in knowledge, experience and skills from the Functional side over to the OT side. This requires OT staff to be suitably competent in areas where OT were not required to be. OT Staff now needs to be Engineer Trained to understand the Functional requirements from the Engineering Team. They need to have past maintenance experience to grasp the issues Maintenance Preparation Technicians are struggling with during the Enterprise Asset Management process. These are all new demands well documented by Alam(2019) as the skills development roadmap.
References
Charles, A. L. (2011). Gathering, Structuring and Modeling Business Process Knowledge of the Response to a Nuclear Crisis: Towards a Simulation Platform for Better Coordination. In Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg., (pp. 486-493).
Parnas, D. A. (1991. ). Assessment of safety-critical software in nuclear power plants. Nuclear safety, 32(2), , pp.189-198.
Coglianese, C. and Mendelson, E., 2010. Meta-regulation and self-regulation. Regulation, pp.12-11.
Alam, F. S. (2019). Nuclear power plants in emerging economies and human resource development: A review. Energy Procedia, 160, pp.3-10.