Large-scale Fault Tree Implementation: A Software Tutorial

Modern systems are becoming increasingly complex and expensive, which requires a systematic method to analyze various failure modes. A common approach is to use Fault Trees (FTs) for quantitative and qualitative reliability analysis. For reliability and safety engineers, one of the key requirements is to determine various combinations of basic events (component faults) that lead to a top-level (system) failure in a fault tree. In this regard, several techniques have been developed to generate Minimal Cut Sets (MCS). A well-known technique is Binary Decision Diagrams (BDD), which help to determine MCS for large fault trees in an efficient manner.