Fault tree analysis with fuzzy gates

Fault tree analysis is an important tool analyzing system reliability. Fault trees consist of gates and events. Gates mean relationships between events. In fault tree analysis, AND, OR gates have been used as typical gates but it is often difficult to model the system structure with the two gates because in many cases we have not exact knowledge on system failure mechanism in early design stage. In this paper, we apply the fuzzy sets theory to modeling the fuzzy system structure, propose the new procedure to calculate the system reliability and a new importance index of basic events.