Variability management of safety and reliability models: An intermediate model towards systematic reuse of component fault trees

Abstract

Reuse of fault trees helps in reducing costs and effort when conducting Fault Tree Analyses (FTAs) for a set of similar systems. Some approaches have been proposed for the systematic reuse of fault trees along with the development of a product line of systems. Nevertheless, these approaches are not longer effective when FTAs are performed after systems have been put into operation. This is mainly due to the lack of product line information required to make fault trees reusable. The model proposed in this paper is a step towards systematically reusing fault trees in the aforementioned context. It acts as an intermediate model between the specification of a system and its corresponding Component Fault Tree (CFT). In particular, it abstracts from the implementation details of a CFT, allowing the integration of variability inherent of product line systems as well as the one obtained from performing fault tree analyses incrementally over time. The model is part of a systematic reuse approach. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.