Computer-Aided Decision Analysis for Improvement of System Reliability

Nowadays, every kind of system is changed so complex and enormous, it is necessary to assure system reliability, product liability and safety. Fault tree analysis(FTA) is a reliability/safety design analysis technique which starts from consideration of system failure effect, referred to as “top event”, and proceeds by determining how these can be caused by single or combined lower level failures or events. So in fault tree analysis, it is important to find the combination of events which affect system failure. Minimal cut sets(MCS) and minimal path sets(MPS) are used in this process. FTA-I computer program is developed which calculates MCS and MPS in terms of Gw-Basic computer language considering Fussell's algorithm. FTA-II computer program which analyzes importance and function cost of VE consists. of five programs as follows : (l) Structural importance of basic event, (2) Structural probability importance of basic event, (3) Structural criticality importance of basic event, (4) Cost-Failure importance of basic event, (5) VE function cost analysis for importance of basic event. In this study, a method of initiation such as failure, function and cost in FTA is suggested, and especially the priority rank which is calculated by computer-aided decision analysis program developed in this study can be used in decision making determining the most important basic event under various conditions. Also the priority rank can be available for the case which selects system component in FMEA analysis.