Research Project: Reliability assurance of safety-critical systems at CERN

Large amounts of energy are stored in the superconducting magnetic circuits of particle accelerators and in the beams generated during operation. Highly reliable protection systems are required to ensure that, in the event of a fault, this energy is not released in an uncontrolled manner, causing catastrophic damage. To ensure that protection systems continue to be reliable, new reliability assurance challenges must be addressed. For example, traditional reliability analysis needs to be extended to better cover failures of programmable units, to which critical functions are increasingly being transferred. For this reason, a guideline for the reliability assurance of safety-critical systems manufactured in small series and consisting of hardware and software is being developed as part of this project.

> detailed project description (.pdf)