Use of Fault Tree Analysis for Automotive Reliability and Safety Analysis

Abstract

Fault tree analysis (FTA) evolved from the aerospace industry in the 1960's. A fault tree is deductive logic model that is generated with a top undesired event in mind. FTA answers the question, "how can something occur?" as opposed to failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) that is inductive and answers the question, "what if?" FTA is used in risk, reliability and safety assessments. FTA is currently being used by several industries such as nuclear power and chemical processing. Typically the automotive industries uses failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) such as design FMEAs and process FMEAs. The use of FTA has spread to the automotive industry. This paper discusses the use of FTA for automotive applications. With the addition automotive electronics for various applications in systems such as engine/power control, cruise control and braking/traction, FTA is well suited to address failure modes within these systems. FTA can determine the importance of these failure modes from various perspectives such as cost, reliability and safety. A fault tree analysis of a car starting system is presented as an example.

Analysis of minimal cut and path sets based on direct partial Boolean derivatives

“…where MPS(x i ) represents the event when at least one MPS that contains component i is functional. This implies that FVI defined by equation (16) quantifies relative contribution of a component to system functioning.…”

“…FVIs (equations (15) and (16)) are defined in terms of MCSs and MPSs, respectively. These equations can be defined on the basis of MCVs and MPVs because there is unambiguous conformance between MCS and MCV and MPS and MPV (see section ''MCV and MPV'').…”

“…Methodologies of fault trees and two terminal networks are used to analyze different types of systems, such as the ones in nuclear power plants, [8][9][10][11] aviation systems, [12][13][14] distribution systems 15 and others. [16][17][18] Special algorithms for reliability analysis of systems with a huge number of MCSs or MPSs are considered in the second group of articles. Examination of such systems is time-consuming; therefore, some techniques that can be used to speed-up the analysis are studied.…”

A formal approach to fault tree synthesis for the analysis of distributed fault tolerant systems

“…There has been prior work in the area of fault tree synthesis and design flows for safety critical systems such as [12] [14] [7]. The work most closely related to this paper is [12], where a methodology is presented that enables fault tree synthesis based on a composition of both a hazard analysis 1 on the architectural components and a functional fault tree annotated with the functional components 2 .…”

An Empirical Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Attack Graphs and Fault Trees in Cyber-Attack Perception

“…Fault trees are used in a number of industries such as in the aerospace industry [94,95,96,97], radioactive waste disposal [98], the automotive industry [99,100] and in the analysis of failure in computer systems [101,102,103]. Although the fault tree standard is a generic standard (not particularly focussing on cyber-security as a target domain), more recently, fault trees have become a popular means of representing cyberattack [40,104,105].…”