\section{State of the Art and Limits of Current Practice}

\textbf{Heilmeier Questions: What has been done? What are the limits of current practice?} 

This section examines how nuclear reactors operate today. No current approach provides autonomous control with end-to-end correctness guarantees—neither human-centered operation nor formal methods. 

Three subsections structure this analysis: first, reactor operators and their operating procedures; second, fundamental limitations of human-based operation; third, formal methods approaches that verify discrete logic or continuous dynamics but not both together.

Section 3 addresses the verification gap these limits establish.

\subsection{Current Reactor Procedures and Operation}

Understanding the limits of current practice requires examining how nuclear plants operate today. Three aspects structure this analysis: the hierarchy of procedures, the role of operators in executing them, and the operational modes that govern reactor control.

Nuclear plant procedures form a strict hierarchy. Normal operating procedures govern routine operations. Abnormal operating procedures handle off-normal conditions. Emergency Operating Procedures (EOPs) manage design-basis accidents. Severe Accident Management Guidelines (SAMGs) address beyond-design-basis events. Extensive Damage Mitigation Guidelines (EDMGs) cover catastrophic damage. All procedures must comply with 10 CFR 50.34(b)(6)(ii); NUREG-0899 provides development guidance~\cite{NUREG-0899, 10CFR50.34}. 

Procedure development relies on expert judgment and simulator validation—not formal verification. 10 CFR 55.59~\cite{10CFR55.59} requires rigorous assessment through technical evaluation, simulator validation testing, and biennial review. Yet key safety properties escape formal verification: no mathematical proofs confirm that procedures cover all possible plant states, that required actions complete within available timeframes, or that transitions between procedure sets maintain safety invariants.

\textbf{LIMITATION:} \textit{Procedures lack formal verification of correctness
and completeness.} Current procedure development relies on expert judgment and
simulator validation—not mathematical proof. No proof exists that procedures cover all
possible plant states, that required actions complete within available
timeframes, or that transitions between procedure sets maintain safety
invariants. Paper-based procedures cannot ensure correct application. Even
computer-based procedure systems lack the formal guarantees automated reasoning
could provide.

Nuclear plants operate with multiple control modes. Automatic control maintains target parameters through continuous reactivity adjustment. Manual control allows operators to directly manipulate the reactor. Various intermediate modes bridge these extremes. In typical pressurized water reactor operation, the reactor control system automatically maintains a floating average temperature, compensating for power demand changes through reactivity feedback loops alone. Safety systems already employ extensive automation. Reactor Protection Systems trip automatically on safety signals with millisecond response times. Engineered safety features actuate automatically on accident signals—no operator action required.

This division between automated and human-controlled functions reveals the fundamental challenge of hybrid control. Highly automated systems already handle reactor protection—automatic trips on safety parameters, emergency core cooling actuation, containment isolation, and basic process control~\cite{WRPS.Description, gentillon_westinghouse_1999}. Human operators retain control of strategic decision-making: power level changes, startup/shutdown sequences, mode transitions, and procedure implementation. This hybrid structure—discrete human decisions combined with continuous automated control—forms the basis for autonomous hybrid control systems.

\subsection{Human Factors in Nuclear Accidents}

The previous subsection established that procedures lack formal verification despite rigorous development—but this represents only half the reliability challenge. Perfect procedures cannot guarantee safe operation when humans execute them imperfectly.

Human operators—the second pillar of current practice—introduce reliability limitations independent of procedure quality. Procedures define what to do; operators determine when and how. This introduces persistent failure modes that training alone cannot eliminate.

Current-generation nuclear power plants employ over 3,600 active NRC-licensed
reactor operators in the United States~\cite{operator_statistics}. These
operators divide into Reactor Operators (ROs), who manipulate reactor controls,
and Senior Reactor Operators (SROs), who direct plant operations and serve as
shift supervisors~\cite{10CFR55}. Staffing typically requires at least two ROs
and one SRO for current-generation units~\cite{10CFR50.54}. Becoming a reactor
operator requires several years of training.

Human error persistently contributes to nuclear safety incidents despite decades of improvements in training and procedures. This persistence motivates formal automated control with mathematical safety guarantees. Under 10 CFR Part 55, operators hold legal authority to make critical decisions, including authority to depart from normal regulations during emergencies. The Three Mile Island (TMI) accident demonstrated how personnel error, design deficiencies, and component failures combine to cause disaster: operators misread confusing and contradictory indications, then shut off the emergency water system~\cite{Kemeny1979}. The President's Commission on TMI identified a fundamental ambiguity—placing responsibility for safe power plant operations on the licensee without formally verifying that operators can fulfill this responsibility guarantees nothing. This tension between operational flexibility and safety assurance remains unresolved: the person responsible for reactor safety often becomes the root cause of failure.

Multiple independent analyses converge on a striking statistic: human error accounts for 70--80\% of nuclear power plant events, compared to approximately 20\% for equipment failures~\cite{WNA2020}. More significantly, human factors—poor safety management and safety culture—caused all severe accidents at nuclear power plants: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima Daiichi~\cite{hogberg_root_2013}. A detailed analysis
of 190 events at Chinese nuclear power plants from
2007--2020~\cite{zhang_analysis_2025} found that active
errors appeared in 53\% of events, while latent errors—organizational and
systemic weaknesses that create conditions for failure—appeared in 92\%.


\textbf{LIMITATION:} \textit{Human factors impose fundamental reliability limits
that training alone cannot overcome.} Four decades of improvements have failed to eliminate human
error—these
limitations are fundamental to human-driven control, not remediable defects.

\subsection{Formal Methods}

The previous two subsections revealed two critical limitations of current practice. First, procedures lack formal verification despite rigorous development processes. Second, human operators introduce persistent reliability issues that four decades of training improvements have failed to eliminate.

Training and procedural improvements cannot solve these problems—they are fundamental limitations, not remediable defects. Formal methods might offer a solution by providing mathematical guarantees of correctness that eliminate both human error and procedural ambiguity. But can they deliver on this promise for autonomous hybrid control systems?

Even the most advanced formal methods applications in nuclear control leave a critical verification gap. This subsection examines two approaches illustrating this gap. HARDENS verified discrete logic without continuous dynamics. Differential dynamic logic handles hybrid verification only post-hoc. Each demonstrates the current state of formal methods while revealing the verification gap my research addresses.

\subsubsection{HARDENS: The State of Formal Methods in Nuclear Control}

The High Assurance Rigorous Digital Engineering for Nuclear Safety (HARDENS)
project represents the most advanced application of formal methods to nuclear
reactor control systems to date~\cite{Kiniry2024}.

HARDENS addressed a fundamental dilemma: existing U.S. nuclear control rooms rely on analog technologies from the 1950s--60s. These technologies incur significant risk and cost compared to modern control systems. The NRC contracted Galois, a formal methods firm, to demonstrate that Model-Based Systems Engineering and formal methods could design, verify, and implement a complex protection system meeting regulatory criteria at a fraction of typical cost. The project delivered a Reactor Trip System (RTS) implementation with full traceability from NRC Request for Proposals and IEEE standards through formal architecture specifications to verified software.

HARDENS employed formal methods tools and techniques across the verification
hierarchy. High-level specifications used Lando, SysMLv2, and FRET (NASA Formal
Requirements Elicitation Tool) to capture stakeholder requirements, domain
engineering, certification requirements, and safety requirements. Requirements
were analyzed for consistency, completeness, and realizability using SAT and SMT
solvers. Executable formal models used Cryptol to create a behavioral model of
the entire RTS, including all subsystems, components, and limited digital twin
models of sensors, actuators, and compute infrastructure. Automatic code
synthesis generated verifiable C implementations and SystemVerilog hardware
implementations directly from Cryptol models---eliminating the traditional gap
between specification and implementation where errors commonly arise.

Despite its accomplishments, HARDENS has a fundamental limitation for hybrid control synthesis: the project addressed only discrete digital control logic. Continuous reactor dynamics remained unmodeled and unverified.
The Reactor Trip System specification and verification covered discrete state transitions (trip/no-trip decisions), digital sensor input processing through discrete logic, and discrete actuation outputs (reactor trip commands). Continuous reactor physics remained unaddressed. Real reactor safety depends on interactions between continuous processes—temperature, pressure, neutron flux—evolving in response to discrete control decisions. HARDENS verified the discrete controller in isolation. The closed-loop hybrid system behavior remained unverified.

\textbf{LIMITATION:} \textit{HARDENS addressed discrete control logic without
continuous dynamics or hybrid system verification.} Verifying discrete control
logic alone provides no guarantee that the closed-loop system exhibits desired
continuous behavior such as stability, convergence to setpoints, or maintained
safety margins.

HARDENS also faced deployment maturity constraints beyond the technical limitation of omitting continuous dynamics. The project produced a demonstrator system at Technology Readiness Level 2--3
(analytical proof of concept with laboratory breadboard validation) rather than
a deployment-ready system validated through extended operational testing. The
NRC Final Report explicitly notes~\cite{Kiniry2024} that all material is
considered in development, not a finalized product, and that ``The demonstration
of its technical soundness was to be at a level consistent with satisfaction of
the current regulatory criteria, although with no explicit demonstration of how
regulatory requirements are met.'' The project did not include deployment in
actual nuclear facilities, testing with real reactor systems under operational
conditions, side-by-side validation with operational analog RTS systems,
systematic failure mode testing (radiation effects, electromagnetic
interference, temperature extremes), NRC licensing review, or human factors
validation with licensed operators in realistic control room scenarios.

\textbf{LIMITATION:} \textit{HARDENS achieved TRL 2--3 without experimental
validation.} While formal verification provides mathematical correctness
guarantees for the implemented discrete logic, the gap between formal
verification and actual system deployment involves myriad practical
considerations: integration with legacy systems, long-term reliability
under harsh environments, human-system interaction in realistic
operational contexts, and regulatory acceptance of formal methods as
primary assurance evidence.

\subsubsection{Differential Dynamic Logic: Post-Hoc Hybrid Verification}

HARDENS verified discrete control logic without continuous dynamics—leaving half the hybrid system unverified. Other researchers attacked the problem from the opposite direction, extending temporal logics to handle hybrid systems directly. This complementary approach produced differential dynamic logic (dL), which addresses continuous dynamics but encounters different limitations. dL introduces two additional operators
into temporal logic: the box operator and the diamond operator. The box operator
\([\alpha]\phi\) states that for some region \(\phi\), the hybrid system
\(\alpha\) always remains within that region. In this way, it is a safety
ivariant being enforced for the system. The second operator, the diamond
operator \(<\alpha>\phi\) says that for the region \(\phi\), there is at least
one trajectory of \(\alpha\) that enters that region. This is a declaration of a
liveness property. 

%source: https://symbolaris.com/logic/dL.html

While dL allows for the specification of these liveness and safety properties,
actually proving them for a given hybrid system is difficult. Automated proof
assistants such as KeYmaera X exist to help develop proofs of systems using dL,
but fail for reasonably complex hybrid systems. State space explosion and
non-terminating solutions prevent creating system proofs using dL. 
%Source: that one satellite tracking paper that has the problem with the
%gyroscopes overloding and needing to dump speed all the time
Approaches have been made to alleviate
these issues for nuclear power contexts using contract and decomposition based
methods, but are far from a complete methodology to design systems with.
%source: Manyu's thesis. 
Instead, these approaches have been used on systems that have been designed a
priori, and require expert knowledge to create the system proofs. 

\textbf{LIMITATION:} \textit{Logic-based hybrid system verification has not
scaled to system design.} While dL and related approaches can verify hybrid
systems post-hoc, they require expert knowledge and have been applied only to
systems designed a priori. State space explosion prevents their use in the
design loop for complex systems like nuclear reactor startup procedures.

\subsection{Summary: The Verification Gap}

This section answered two Heilmeier questions: What has been done? What are the limits of current practice?

\textbf{What has been done?} Three approaches currently exist, each with fundamental limitations:
\begin{itemize}
\item Human operators provide operational flexibility but introduce persistent reliability limitations that four decades of training improvements have failed to eliminate.
\item HARDENS verified discrete logic but omitted continuous dynamics.
\item Differential dynamic logic expresses hybrid properties but requires post-design expert analysis and fails to scale to system synthesis.
\end{itemize}
No existing approach addresses both discrete and continuous verification compositionally.

\textbf{What are the limits of current practice?} No existing methodology synthesizes provably correct hybrid controllers from operational procedures with verification integrated into design. Current approaches verify either discrete logic or continuous dynamics—never both compositionally. This verification gap prevents autonomous nuclear control with end-to-end correctness guarantees. Training improvements cannot overcome human reliability limits; post-hoc verification cannot scale to system design.

Two imperatives converge: economic necessity demands solutions, and technical opportunity enables them. Small modular reactors cannot compete with per-megawatt staffing costs matching large conventional plants. Formal methods tools have matured to enable compositional hybrid verification.

Section 3 closes this verification gap by establishing what makes this approach new and why it will succeed.
