Regulatory Software Configuration Management System Design

Abstract

The gap between nuclear safety-related regulations and the commercial software configuration management causes software quality concerns for Digital Control and Information System (DCIS) of a nuclear power plant. The main reason is that the DCIS of a nuclear plant are usually constructed by multiple vendors and each vendor of the DCIS has its own development environment, such as its development platform, software language and source code. The difficulty often comes from lacking consistence and integrity among the different vendors. Therefore, it is a great challenge to manage all configuration items from multiple vendors and to manage the heterogeneous subsystems within DCIS of a nuclear power plant. The Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI) defines the Configuration Management (CM) as a process area that provides detailed practices of controlling and managing the software work products. This paper proposes an Agent-based Software Configuration Management (ABSCM) System based on the CM process area of CMMI as well as nuclear safety-related regulations to support the operation of nuclear power plant.