A Modular Approach to Fault Tree Analysis
USNRC, James Olmes, Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States), Lothar Wolf · 1979
An analytical method to describe fault tree diagrams in terms of their modular composition is developed. Fault tree structures are characterized by recursively relating the top tree event to all its basic component inputs through a set of equations defining each of the modules for the fault tree. It is shown that such a modular description is an extremely valuable tool for making a quantitative analysis of fault trees. The modularization methodology has been implemented into the PL-MOD computer code, written in PL/1 language, which is capable of modularizing fault trees containing replicated components and replicated modular gates. PL-MOD in addition can handle mutually exclusive inputs and explicit higher order symmetric (k-out of - n) gates.