Efficient extraction of the structure formula from reliability block diagrams with dependent basic events
Michael Pock, Max Walter · Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers Part O Journal of Risk and Reliability · 2008
Traditional solution methods for fault trees or reliability block diagrams can only be applied as long as the failure and repair events of all components of the system are stochastically independent. In this paper, an efficient algorithm is presented based on binary decision diagram-like data structures that are able to evaluate systems including intercomponent dependencies between arbitrary components. The algorithm, which was integrated into the software package OpenSESAME, is shown to be as good as traditional algorithms for the special case of independent components. The performance of the algorithm in the more general case was empirically analysed using some real-world examples. Very short running times and a moderate memory consumption were observed.