Citation

Shafaghi A, Lees FP, Andow PK. Reliab. Eng. 1984; 8(4): 193-233.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1984, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/0143-8174(84)90007-6

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The construction of fault trees is normally a manual process, but there is growing interest in systematic, computer-based methods of fault tree synthesis. Usually the basis of these methods is that the plant is decomposed into a set of units, but this approach has the weakness that the resulting fault trees tend to have a structure which is rather opaque. A method of fault tree synthesis has been developed which is based on decomposing the plant into a set of control loops and which yields fault trees which do have a clear structure. The method is outlined and then illustrated by a substantial example. The application of the method to event tree synthesis is also briefly illustrated. Although the method in its present form is a manual one, it is considered to be applicable to computer-based synthesis and has been developed with this in view.