Reliability design for a novel central control system

General Electric Global Research Center has been developing a novel centralized computer control system with redundancy in order to achieve very high system reliability and safety to protect distributed critical power supply system. During the concept and prototype design, there are various system reliability and safety issues need to be addressed: capturing of customer's voice on system reliability and safety, comparing reliability and safety of this novel design with the current design (local protection system) in market to ensure that the new design has better market value, and obtaining a well established system model to be used by GE business in real product design, manufacturing, marketing and service. This paper summarizes these efforts in this new system design.