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An efficient real-time method of analysis for non-coherent fault trees

Remenyte-Prescott, Rasa; Andrews, John

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Authors

JOHN ANDREWS john.andrews@nottingham.ac.uk
Professor of Infrastructure Asset Management



Abstract

Fault tree analysis is commonly used to assess the reliability of potentially hazardous industrial systems. The type of logic is usually restricted to AND and OR gates which makes the fault tree structure coherent. In non-coherent structures not only components’ failures but also components’ working states contribute to the failure of the system. The qualitative and quantitative analyses of such fault trees can present additional difficulties when compared to the coherent versions. It is shown that the Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) method can overcome some of the difficulties in the analysis of non-coherent fault trees.
This paper presents the conversion process of non-coherent fault trees to BDDs. A fault tree is converted to a BDD that represents the system structure function (SFBDD). A SFBDD can then be used to quantify the system failure parameters but is not suitable for the qualitative analysis. Established methods, such as the meta-products BDD method, the zero-suppressed BDD (ZBDD) method and the labelled BDD (L-BDD) method, require an additional BDD that contains all prime implicant sets. The process using some of the methods can be time consuming and not very efficient. In addition, in real time applications the conversion process is less important and the requirement is to provide an efficient analysis. Recent uses of the BDD method are for real time system prognosis. In such situations as events happen, or failures occur the prediction of mission success is updated and used in the decision making process. Both qualitative and quantitative assessment are required for the decision making. Under these conditions fast processing and small storage requirements are essential. Fast processing is a feature of the BDD method. It would be advantageous if a single BDD structure could be used for both the qualitative and quantitative analyses. Therefore, a new method, the ternary decision diagram (TDD) method, is presented in this paper, where a fault tree is converted to a TDD that allows both qualitative and quantitative analyses and no additional BDDs are required. The efficiency of the four methods is compared using an example fault tree library.

Citation

Remenyte-Prescott, R., & Andrews, J. (2009). An efficient real-time method of analysis for non-coherent fault trees. Quality and Reliability Engineering International, 25(2), https://doi.org/10.1002/qre.955

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Mar 1, 2009
Deposit Date Jul 31, 2014
Publicly Available Date Jul 31, 2014
Journal Quality and Reliability Engineering International
Print ISSN 0748-8017
Electronic ISSN 1099-1638
Publisher Wiley
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 25
Issue 2
DOI https://doi.org/10.1002/qre.955
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1013927
Publisher URL http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qre.955/abstract
Additional Information This is the accepted version of the following article: R. Remenyte-Prescott & J.D. Andrews, An efficient real-time method of analysis for non-coherent fault trees, Quality and Reliability Engineering International, 25(2), (2009), 129-150, which has been published in final form at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qre.955/abstract

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