Fault Tree Analysis: 10 Prime Implicants and Beyond

The performances of almost all available fault tree analysis tools are limited by the performance of the prime implicant computation procedure they use. All these procedures manipulate the prime implicants of the fault trees explicitly, so that their complexities are directly related to the number of prime implicants to be generated. This paper presents a new analysis method of coherent as well as noncoherent fault trees that overcomes this limitation because its computational cost is not related to either the number of variables or the number of gates or the number of prime implicants of these trees. The interactive fault tree analyser METAPRIME that is based on this new method has been shown by experience to be able to perform in seconds the complete analysis of noncoherent fault trees with more than 10 prime implicants.