An improved minimal cut set algorithm

Abstract

Fault tree analysis: literature review Fault tree analysis was conceived and developed by Watson[1] in 1961Watson[1] in -1962 at the Bell laboratories as part of a collaborative research contract with the US Air Force. The technique was used to study the inadvertent launch in the Minuteman Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM).Fault tree reports were subsequently published by the Boeing Company and AVCO in March 1963 and January 1964 respectively. In June 1965, the Boeing Company and the university of Washington organized a symposium on safety analysis and system safety in Seattle, where a large number of papers[2-4] were presented by Boeing employees including Haasl, Michels and Nagel. Since then, the concepts and techniques used in fault tree analysis [5] continued to be developed. FTA is regarded today as an established methodology for the safety and reliability study of large and complex systems.A historical use of fault tree analysis was made by Professor Rasmussen when he carried out the well-known WASH 1400 study [6]. This was the first scientific attempt to provide quantitative risk analyses of nuclear power plants.In the WASH 1400 study, fault tree analysis was used to estimate the probability of each event in the accident path and that of the overall probability of various types of accidents.Since 1961, a significant amount of time and effort has been spent constructing, using, evaluating and applying fault trees to compute the overall reliability of a wide spectrum of complex systems including electrical systems[7-9], chemical processing systems [10][11][12][13], nuclear reactor safety study [14][15][16][17][18][19][20], product safety [21][22][23] and decision making in systems analysis [24,25].The fundamental concept in fault tree analysis is the translation of a physical system into a structured logic diagram (called a fault tree), in which specified causes lead to one, and only one, specific and undesired event (normally called the top event). Fault tree analysis can be conveniently divided into four main stages:(1) system definition;(2) fault tree construction;(3) qualitative evaluation;(4) quantitative evaluation.