Identification of independent modules in fault trees which contain dependent basic events [An article from: Reliability Engineering and System Safety]

This digital document is a journal article from Reliability Engineering and System Safety, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
The reliability performance of a system is frequently a function of component failures of which some are independent whilst others are interdependent. It is possible to represent the system failure logic in a fault tree diagram, however only the sections containing independent events can be assessed using the conventional fault tree analysis methodology. The analysis of the dependent sections will require a Markov analysis. Since the efficiency of the Markov analysis largely depends on the size of the established Markov model, the key is to extract from the fault tree the smallest sections which contain dependencies. This paper proposes a method aimed at establishing the smallest Markov model for the dependencies contained within the fault tree.