Dynamic fault tree analysis: Simulation approach

Abstract

Fault tree analysis (FTA) is extensively used for reliability and safety assessment of complex and critical engineering systems. One of the important limitations of conventional FTA is the inability for one to incorporate complex component interactions such as sequence dependent failures. Dynamic gates are introduced to extend conventional FT to model these complex interactions. This chapter presents various methods available in the literature to solve dynamic fault trees (DFT). Special emphasis on a simulation-based approach is given as analytical methods have some practical limitations.