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Modeling and analysis of State/Event Fault Trees using ESSaRel

Authors:
Kavyashree Jamboti
Michael Roth
Robin Brandstädter
Peter Liggesmeyer

Keywords: Fault trees, Reliability tool, Safety tool, State/Event Fault Tress, ESSaRel

Abstract:
Fault Trees (FTs) have been a popular tool used in the industry and academia to model safety related failure scenarios of systems. However, since FTs are incapable of modeling certain type of scenarios involving stochastic dependency, timing and sequencing properties, they need to be extended or modified to handle such scenarios. A State/Event Fault Tree (SEFT) is one such tool for developing and analyzing systems with dynamic behavior involving sequencing, timing and priorities of events that cannot be modeled by ordinary fault trees. SEFTs encompass dynamic behavior in the form of state charts for constituent components of a system where failure propagation between components is made possible by outports and inports. Conceptually, SEFTs borrow the notion of components from Component Fault Trees (CFTs). CFTs are nothing but fault trees which encompass boolean logic related to failure within the corresponding component boundaries. The ESSaRel tool was initially built to model CFTs. In this paper, we describe our experiences with the implementation of an editor for SEFTs by extending the ESSaRel tool. We describe the concepts behind the design decisions of the tool and the challenges that were addressed in order to reduce the burden on the user to develop 'correct' SEFTs. We also give some insights and tips for engineers who would like to use SEFTs as modeling correct SEFTs requires a good understanding of the semantics of its modeling elements.

Pages: 48 to 53

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2013

Publication date: August 25, 2013

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4324

ISBN: 978-1-61208-301-8

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from August 25, 2013 to August 31, 2013