A New Approach for the Construction of Fault Trees from System Simulink

Fault tree analysis is a common method for reliability, safety, and availability assessment of digital systems. Since 70s, a number of construction and analysis methods have been introduced in the literature. The main difference between these methods is the starting model from which the tree is constructed. This paper presents a novel methodology for the construction of fault tree from a system Simulink model, and introduces a fault tree analysis approach in the Simulink environment. The analysis method evaluates static fault tree of a system. The method is introduced and explained in details and its correctness and completeness is validated by using a number of examples. The limitations of the proposed methodology are related to the limitations of the MATLAB-Simulink toolbox. Important advantages of the method are also stated.