Event-Sequence Analysis-It´s How You Think!

Event-sequence analysis is an innovative - some might say radical alternative to fault-tree analysis and Markov-chain analysis for analyzing system safety and reliability. It is particularly useful when analyzing systems which might experience mutually-related failures. Event-sequence analyses are also more intuitive and natural both to create and to interpret, and they can be composed on a word processor. A disadvantage of event-sequence analysis relative to fault-tree analysis is that, because event-sequence analysis more closely reflects real life, both its logic and its failure-probability calculations are more complex. Three approximations are presented which allow failure probabilities to be determined easily, but still with acceptably small errors on the conservative side for safety and reliability analyses. Event-sequence analysis is a powerful alternative for performing risk analyses, both probabilistic and nonprobabilistic