Model-Based Reliability and Safety: Reducing the Complexity of Safety Analyses Using Component Fault Trees

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how component fault trees can simplify safety analysis in complex industrial systems, reducing effort and improving reliability assessments through a large-scale case study.

Contribution

It introduces the application of component fault trees in safety analysis, comparing them with classic fault trees and highlighting their advantages in industrial contexts.

Findings

Component fault trees reduce analysis complexity.

They offer better scalability for complex safety mechanisms.

Case study shows improved efficiency in safety assessments.

Abstract

The importance of mission or safety critical software systems in many application domains of embedded systems is continuously growing, and so is the effort and complexity for reliability and safety analysis. Model driven development is currently one of the key approaches to cope with increasing development complexity, in general. Applying similar concepts to reliability, availability, maintainability and safety (RAMS) analysis activities is a promising approach to extend the advantages of model driven development to safety engineering activities aiming at a reduction of development costs, a higher product quality and a shorter time-to-market. Nevertheless, many model-based safety or reliability engineering approaches aim at reducing the analysis complexity but applications or case studies are rare. Therefore we present here a large scale industrial case study which shows the benefits of the application of component fault trees when it comes to complex safety mechanisms. We compare the methodology of component fault trees against classic fault trees and summarize benefits and drawbacks of both modeling methodologies.