Interactive Visualization of Fault Trees

In this paper we present a case study of using interactive visualization of fault trees and fault tree analysis to improve understanding of the concept of fault trees and the exploration of the results of their analysis. The fault tree model is widely used by experts to analyze risks in many different fields. We believe that the current way of interacting with these fault tree models and the results of their analysis is prohibitive to many non-technical users and unnecessarily complicated for technical users. By creating a more intuitive method of interaction we hope to spread their use and increase their effectiveness to lower risks in fields that practice risk analysis. To create this interactive visualization we first examined the fundamental visualization principles and basic interaction techniques. We then combined these principles with our knowledge of fault trees to create a set of requirements for the visualization. These requirements were then used to choose a web framework and design a prototype visualization to validate our hypothesis.