On the efficiency of functional decomposition in fault tree analysis

Recently the functional decomposition method for the analysis of complex fault trees was proposed by the authors. A fault tree is recursively decomposed into a set of mutually exclusive simpler fault trees up to their dimensions are compatible with the available working memory size. Then, the analysis results of simpler trees are composed to obtain the results for the original un-decomposed fault tree. Since a fault tree is decomposed with respect to a small subset S of the vector x of basic events, the efficiency of the decomposition process is highly dependent on this subset. Hence the problem is how to select the events of S in order to minimise the fault tree analysis time. This paper describes and compares four different methods to construct S with the aim of identifying the one for which the decomposition procedure requires the least computational resources. Due to the heuristic nature of this problem it was necessary to experimentally test all criteria on a number of fault trees in order to draw useful indications on the relatively “best” method(s).

MATUZAS Vaidas;  CONTINI Sergio; 

2014-08-27

SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD

JRC69880

1748-006X,   

http://pio.sagepub.com/content/226/6/635,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC69880,   

10.1177/1748006X12458995,