Verification of Component Fault Trees Using Error Effect Simulations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a combined approach of Component Fault Trees and Error Effect Simulations to improve safety assessment efficiency for complex safety-critical systems, enabling early detection of safety violations and reducing analysis overhead.

Contribution

It presents a novel integrated method that combines deductive safety analysis with simulation-based sanity checks for more effective safety assurance.

Findings

Reduces subjective failure propagation assumptions in safety analysis.

Enables early safety goal violation detection during design.

Supports continuous refinement and reuse of safety models.

Abstract

The growing complexity of safety-relevant systems causes an increasing effort for safety assurance. The reduction of development costs and time-to-market, while guaranteeing safe operation, is therefore a major challenge. In order to enable efficient safety assessment of complex architectures, we present an approach, which combines deductive safety analyses, in form of Component Fault Trees (CFTs), with an Error Effect Simulation (EES) for sanity checks. The combination reduces the drawbacks of both analyses, such as the subjective failure propagation assumptions in the CFTs or the determination of relevant fault scenarios for the EES. Both CFTs and the EES provide a modular, reusable and compositional safety analysis and are applicable throughout the whole design process. They support continuous model refinement and the reuse of conducted safety analysis and simulation models. Hence, safety goal violations can be identified in early design stages and the reuse of conducted safety analyses reduces the overhead for safety assessment.