Nearly ten years have elapsed since the introduction of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA). At the time the agreement was negotiated concern was expressed that the reduction of tariff barriers would remove the incentive for much US foreign direct investment (FDI) into Canada. This paper provides empirical evidence to show that US foreign direct investment into Canada has continued to grow...

Safety is an important requirement for many modern systems. To ensure safety of complex critical systems, well-known safety analysis methods have been formalized. This holds in particular for automation sytsems and transportation systems. In this paper we present the formalization of one of the most wide spread safety analysis methods: fault tree analysis (FTA). Formal FTA allows to rigorously ...

Fault tree analysis (FTA) is a standardised technique used by engineers to explore possible failure states of safety-critical systems. Since the FTA is generally practised informally and thus, it cannot be guaranteed that it is applied correctly, several formal approaches have been introduced in the past (e.g. [STR02]) for allowing engineers to verify that they built a fault tree considering th...

Software Fault Tree Analysis (SFTA) provides a structured way to reason about the safety or reliability of a software system. As such, SFTA is widely used in missioncritical applications to investigate contributing causes to possible hazards or failures. In this paper we propose an approach similar to SFTA for product families. The contribution of the paper is to define a top-down, treebased an...

The developed software ASNA-2, which is an improved version of the software ASNA-1, is based on the technology of automated estimation of reliability indexes of fault-tolerant systems. This software is designed for automated evaluation of the reliability indexes of fault-tolerant hardware – software systems. This paper describes a software ASNA-2 with the peculiarities of procedures of reliabil...

In recent years, Many manufacturing industries for promoting their efficiency have tended to use the automatic manufacturing systems. Expanding automatic systems and to increase their complexity are representing the necessity of studying a proper functional quality and using reliable equipment in such systems more than ever. In this direction, the technique of fault tree analysis (FTA), along w...

Fault tree analysis is a traditional and well-established technique for analyzing system design and robustness. Its purpose is to identify sets of basic events, called cut sets, which can cause a given top level event, e.g. a system malfunction, to occur. Generating fault trees is particularly critical in the case of reactive systems, as hazards can be the result of complex interactions involvi...

Pramod Vachhani, Sridharakumar Narasimhan, and Raghunathan Rengaswamy Process fault diagnosis is the problem of identifying the causal origins of faults in a process, given current sensor data and a priori knowledge about the process behaviour under normal and abnormal conditions. Fault diagnosis is increasingly becoming important for process safety, improved product quality and process economi...