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RiskSpectrum licensees can today
be found in all corners of the world and 45% of the world’s nuclear
power plants use RiskSpectrum PSA Professional in their Probabilistic
Safety Assessments (PSA).
RiskSpectrum licensees have
invested thousands and thousands of man hours into producing fault tree
and event tree models using RiskSpectrum FT and PSA Professional and we
believe that it is important for RELCON to provide RiskSpectrum
licensees with the next generation software tools for fault tree and
event tree modelling and analysis ensuring a sustainable solution for
their continued and uninterrupted PSA activities. It is also important,
for the software's continued existence, that the software stays
competitive and remains the preferred choice of risk assessment
engineers worldwide.
For these reasons RELCON started
a major undertaking in 2003 to develop the fourth generation
RiskSpectrum fault tree and event tree software from RELCON. Since then
more than 30000 man hours have been invested in its development.
The new software has been
developed under the working name "RS32". It replaces RiskSpectrum FT and
PSA Professional and will be distributed free of charge to all licensees
with support agreements.
RS32 is available in two
versions:
RiskSpectrum PSA: Replaces RiskSpectrum PSA
Professional and includes all its functions and features plus a number
of new features.
RiskSpectrum FTA: Replaces RiskSpectrum FT
Professional and includes all its functions and features plus a number
of new features.
RiskSpectrum Analysis Tools (RSAT) is the
calculation engine included in the RiskSpectrum PSA and FT Professional
packages and is since 1998 already a 32 bit application. Its development
runs independently of RS32 and it is integrated to work seamlessly also
with RS32.
The user will experience mainly
a lot of user friendliness and ease of working with the new environment
and will not experience any major differences with respect to the old
versions. The transition is easy. In RS32 you can select a RiskSpectrum
FT/PSA Professional project and automatically convert it into the RS32
format. After that you simply continue to work with your project in
RS32.
- The Graphical User Interface (GUI) will look
familiar, yet modern. The aim has been to keep the GUI similar to
the old applications but with a new and fresh look and feel. By
keeping them similar, “old users” will feel comfortable with the
transition to the new version.
- The new environment offers many intuitive and
time-saving new features that will facilitate his/hers work. New
techniques that were unavailable at the time of the development of
the old applications will now make it possible to enhance the user
friendliness. One example is the use of multiple “Floating Record
Lists” from which the user can drag-and-drop, for example basic
events, into fault trees, consequences into event trees, etc.
- The database is updated to SQL Server instead
of the outdated Microsoft JET engine which is being used today. The
freely distributed lightweight version of SQL Server: SQL Express is
provided. The use of SQL Server allows for more efficient database
handling which in turn gives a faster communication between the
application and the database.
- The database format is changed slightly to
improve the applications´ performance.
- The user will not experience any major
differences. It will still be as easy and convenient to move a
project from one location to another as it is today.
- Project files can hold more than 8 character
(the .rsd files)
- Results no longer have their own list of
records. Instead results are made part of the analysis case they
belong to.
The following are some of the
new features being added in the first version of the application.
- Undo, it is possible to undo changes to a
model one step back.
- The use of new components allows for improved
printing functionality.
- It is possible to define basic events as
either initiator or enabler. This is useful when doing reliability
analyses calculating W. A basic event defined as an initiator is
only included with its frequency and the enabler is only included
with its probability.
- Improved tracing of changes e.g. filter/tag
all records and all related records that has been changed since a
given date.
- New multi window display, e.g. all open
windows are displayed as tabs, lists and floating windows can be
automatically minimised or "pinned" to a certain place in the
display.
- It is possible to lock a model. Once a model
has been locked, no changes can be made to the model until it has
been unlocked.
- Models converted into or created in RS32 will
be password protected.
- Events that have exchange events defined are
highlighted in the fault tree graphics.
- The new version will use hardware keys to
protect the software from unlawful use. In addition there is a
server key solution available, which means that the program can
detect a key on any PC in a network. E.g. one key programmed for X
number of simultaneous users can keep track of the users on your
company LAN.
- It is possible to display more than one
result window at a time.
RELCON uses the latest Microsoft
development platform .NET for the RS32 application.
- The .NET Framework is a high-productivity,
standards-based, multi-language application execution environment
that handles essential software tasks and ease deployment.
- The application execution environment manages
memory, addresses versioning issues, and improves the reliability,
scalability, and security of an application.
- The common language runtime is the engine in
the .NET Framework that provides a managed execution environment,
which is protected by industry-standard technologies, and is
designed to support developers using many different languages to
create applications.
- The use of Microsoft SQL Server will allow
for better performance on the back-end.
RELCON is constantly motivated
to work on adding new exciting features for coming releases to keep up
the reputation of RiskSpectrum as being the most advanced software for
Reliability, Risk and availability analyses. We value and welcome any
ideas from our users in further enhancement of our software
capabilities.
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