ETMA: A New Software for Event Tree Analysis with Application to Power Protection

TL;DR

The paper introduces ETMA, a novel software tool that automates the construction, reduction, and probabilistic analysis of event trees, enhancing safety analysis processes especially in power grid systems.

Contribution

ETMA provides automatic event tree modeling, reduction, and probabilistic analysis, addressing limitations of existing tools that require manual diagram creation.

Findings

ETMA successfully automates complete event tree analysis.

ETMA's results align well with commercial tools like Isograph.

Application to power grid fault protection demonstrates ETMA's practical utility.

Abstract

Event Tree (ET) analysis is a widely used forward deductive safety analysis technique for decision-making at a system design stage. Existing ET tools usually provide Graphical Users Interfaces (GUI) for users to manually draw system-level ET diagrams, which consist of nodes and branches, describing all possible success and failure scenarios. However, these tools do not include some important ET analysis steps, e.g., the automatic generation and reduction of a complete system ET diagram. In this paper, we present a new Event Trees Modeling and Analysis (ETMA) tool to facilitate users to conduct a complete ET analysis of a given system. Some key features of ETMA include: (i) automatic construction of a complete ET model of real-world systems; (ii) deletion/reduction of unnecessary ET nodes and branches; (iii) partitioning of ET paths; and (iv) probabilistic analysis of the occurrence of a certain event. For illustration purposes, we utilize our ETMA tool to conduct the ET analysis of a protective fault trip circuit in power grid transmission lines. We also compared the ETMA results with Isograph, which is a well-known commercial tool for ET analysis.