Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) is widely applied to assess the failure probability of industrial systems. Many computer packages are available which are based on conventional Kinetic Tree Theory methods. When dealing with large (possibly non-coherent) fault trees, the limitations of the technique in terms of accuracy of the solutions and the efficiency of the processing time becomes apparent. Over r...

This paper presents a new state space generation approach for dynamic fault trees (DFTs) together with a technique to synthesise failures rates in DFTs. Our state space generation technique aggressively exploits the DFT structure — detecting symmetries, spurious non-determinism, and don’t cares. Benchmarks show a gain of more than two orders of magnitude in terms of state space generation and a...

System reliability analysis refers to the evaluation of the reliability of a system based on the reliabilities of its elements. Several methods can be applied to the system reliability analysis, such as reliability graph, fault tree analysis, Markov chain, and Monte Carlo simulation. Each method has its own characteristics, merits and demerits. Among the existing methods, the fault tree analysi...

Fault tree analysis (FTA) has been used in the chemical process industry (CPI) for systematic safety and reliability analysis during the past decades. Conventional manual construction of fault trees can be extremely time consuming and vulnerable to human error. A computer-aided fault tree synthesis methodology can be an initial step, or as an independent check to assist or supplement manual FTA...