Visual approach facilitating the importance analysis of component fault trees

Abstract

(Component) fault tree analysis is a safety analysis technique of embedded systems. Importance analysis estimates the respective contributions of potential basic failures to an overall system failure. The analysis results are typically represented in data-aggregated forms. There are only few associations between these forms and component fault tree structures that provide meaningful information. In this paper, we propose a visualization approach that integrates the importance analysis results with structures of component fault trees. This approach facilitates the identification of the critical components and supports the analysis of the influence of the important basic failures. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.