Safety Analysis for Complex Systems Based on Petri Nets and Reachability Trees

The safety of the complex systems depends not only on all failed states of system components, but also on the sequence of occurrences of those failures. Classical methods in sequential failure analysis always starts with given sequences of the failures in the system, so the sequences of the failures should be identified and the probability of their occurrences should be determined. The method used in this paper employs Petri nets modeling and reachability trees, which can be used for identifying the failure sequences and assessing the probability of the occurrence in complex systems. Finally, the method is demonstrated on an example of an automated assemble system.