Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, July 26 2012 @ 07:51 PM EDT |
Having actually been in power plant control rooms (admittedly not nuclear),
Siemens etc don't write their own operating systems for control software
(thankfully...). Windows isn't a bad choice in that MS will practically never
break backward compatibility and contrary to what you might think, control
software isn't real time critical (obviously the plant itself isn't running
windows of course).
Sure you could use <other os> instead, but are you really changing that
much there? These aren't exactly open environments so outside of hardware
failure stability isn't an issue.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: albert on Friday, July 27 2012 @ 05:36 PM EDT |
There was a Simpsons episode where Homer ran the control room, IIRC, he
accidentally prevented a meltdown, using eeny, meeny, miny, moe to pick the
right button.
I used to write custom Operator Interface software on Windows XP, for factory
use. Never had an OS crash, and they shut off the computer by killing power.
Never had a bootup problem, either. Very harsh environments.
Most MMI (man/machine interface) software is written for Windows.
For a nuclear plant (really, ANY plant), you need:
1. NO connection to the internet, not even temporary.
2. NO removable media connections, USB, DVD, etc.
3. No access to the OS by an operator.
Unfortunately, I doubt if all of these restrictions apply to
most MMI installations.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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