Fault Tree analysis including component dependencies

Tolo, Silvia; Andrews, John

Abstract

The inability of commonly used risk assessment methodologies to model component dependency is often recognised to be a barrier towards more realistic modelling of systems complexity. This is a significant limitation associated with widely adopted techniques such as Fault and Event Trees (FT/ET), which rely on the often unjustified assumption of stochastic independence among systems' components. The research presented provides mathematical solutions able to tackle the two main challenges associated with the modelling of dependency in reliability and safety system analysis: on the one hand, the achievement of adequate flexibility for representing realistically a wide variety of system settings and interrelations; on the other, the computational feasibility of the methodology, still retaining the familiarity of commonly used approaches (i.e. FT/ET). The proposed methodology relies on the use of Binary Decision Diagrams as well as on the manipulation of joint probabilities according to Bayes' theorem. The technique is demonstrated using a simple numerical application for verification.

Citation

Tolo, S., & Andrews, J. (2022). Fault Tree analysis including component dependencies. In M. C. Leva, E. Patelli, L. Podofillini, & S. Wilson (Eds.), Book of Extended Abstracts for the 32nd European Safety and Reliability Conference (133-134)

• Conference Name: 32nd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2022)
• Conference Location: Dublin, Ireland
• Start Date: Aug 28, 2022
• End Date: Sep 1, 2022
• Acceptance Date: Jun 24, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Sep 2, 2022
• Publication Date: Sep 2, 2022
• Deposit Date: Sep 8, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 8, 2022
• Pages: 133-134
• Book Title: Book of Extended Abstracts for the 32nd European Safety and Reliability Conference
• ISBN: 97898118511834
• Keywords: Fault Trees; Safety Analysis; Component Dependency; Degradation; Markov Models; Petri Nets
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/10916495
• Related Public URLs: https://rpsonline.com.sg/rps2prod/esrel22-epro/ESREL22-Book-Extended-Abstracts.pdf; ; https://easychair.org/smart-program/ESREL2022/2022-08-31.html#talk:199776
• Additional Information: Abstract of paper given at the 32nd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2022), 28 August -1 September 2022, Dublin, Ireland