Title :
Fault tree analysis: 1020 prime implicants and beyond
Author :
Coudert, Olivier ; Madre, Jean Christophe
Author_Institution :
Bull Corp. Res. Center, Les Clayes sous Bois, France
Abstract :
The performances of almost all available fault tree analysis tools are limited by the performance of the prime implicant computation procedure used. All these products manipulate the prime implicants of the fault trees explicitly, so that their complexities are directly related to the number of prime implicants to be generated. The authors present a novel analysis method of coherent as well as noncoherent fault trees that overcomes this limitation because its computational cost is not related to the number of variables, gates, or prime implicants of these trees. The interactive fault tree analyzer MetaPrime based on this new method has been shown by experience to be able to perform in seconds the complete analysis of noncoherent fault trees with more than 1020 prime implicants
Keywords :
Boolean functions; computational complexity; decision theory; failure analysis; interactive systems; software tools; binary decision diagram; coherent fault trees; computational cost; fault tree analysis; implicit prime computation; interactive fault tree analyzer MetaPrime; noncoherent fault trees; prime implicants; Binary decision diagrams; Boolean functions; Compaction; Computational efficiency; Data structures; Fault trees; Performance analysis;
Conference_Titel :
Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, 1993. Proceedings., Annual
Conference_Location :
Atlanta, GA
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-0943-X
DOI :
10.1109/RAMS.1993.296849
