Fault Tree Software Facilitates The Creation Of Diagrams

World class analytical software, FaultTree, is a very popular software package, incorporating fault tree analysis, event tree analysis, and markov analysis, which is used effectively in solving fault trees of the order of 20,000 gates and 20,000 basic events. The software runs on standard Microsoft Windows environment, allowing simple creation and or adaptation, and the software has been in use in a wide range of engineering industrial projects, with user-friendly interface. The analysis technique was first developed in the early part of 1960, and since that time, it is being used widely in engineering industries as the primer technique to perform reliability and safety analysis.

FaultTree facilitates the creation of diagrams, which are composed of gates and basic events. The logical description of a system failure is represented by the events, and this logical description is known as TOP event, which refers to the failure of components in the system. The failure characteristics of the system are assigned to the software after creation of the diagram, and after completion of the models the system analysis is performed. In doing this analysis, FaultTree at first computes the minimum number of component failures that would give such system failure. These are known as minimal cut sets. At the final operation, the quantitative parameters are calculated by FaultTree, such as, system unavailability and failure frequency.

The interaction of system and other failures are represented graphically by the FaultTree software. The basic events of failures in a system form the bottom of the fault tree, which are linked via logic symbols to one or more TOP events. These logic symbols are known as gates. The system hazards or the system failure modes are represented by these TOP events, in which the predicted reliability or availability data is required.

Typical TOP events might be:

Total loss of production. Safety system unavailable. Explosion. Loss of mission. Toxic emission.

The component and human faults are generally represented by the basic events located at the bottom of the fault tree for which statistical failure, and repair data is available.

Typical basic events are:

Pump failure. Temperature controller failure. Switch fails closed. Operator does not respond.

FaultTree may be used in analysing large and complex systems, particularly adaptable to analysis of redundancy arrangements. FaultTree facilitates event tree analysis, in which the event tree model may be created. This can be created independent of fault tree model, or could also be created from the use of fault tree analysis gate results, which form the source of event tree probabilities. FaultTree software has efficiency, accuracy, stability, and ruggedness built into the product, having world-wide installations. The software is being used currently by major projects, such as, aerospace, defense, automotive, nuclear, rail, chemical process plant, oil & gas, and medical among many others.

FaultTree analysis provides cost sensitive designing in real-time control systems for critical safety applications. These projects require careful analysis of solutions for their cost aspects vis-a-vis the performance. This further complicates the difficult task of deploying the embedded software that implements the control algorithms on a possibly distributed execution platform (for instance in automotive applications). In this paper, we present a novel technique for constructing a fault tree that models how component faults may lead to system failure.

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