A Weibull-based compositional approach for hierarchical dynamic fault trees

The solution of a dynamic fault tree (DFT) for the reliability assessment can be achieved using a wide variety of techniques. These techniques have a strong theoretical foundation as both the analytical and the simulation methods have been extensively developed. Nevertheless, they all present the same limits that appear with the increasing of the size of the fault trees (i.e., state space explosion, time-consuming simulations), compromising the resolution. We have tested the feasibility of a composition algorithm based on a Weibull distribution, addressed to the resolution of a general class of dynamic fault trees characterized by non-repairable basic events and generally distributed failure times. The proposed composition algorithm is used to generalize the traditional hierarchical technique that, as previous literature have extensively confirmed, is able to reduce the computational effort of a large DFT through the modularization of independent parts of the tree. The results of this study are achieved both through simulation and analytical techniques, thus confirming the capability to solve a quite general class of dynamic fault trees and overcome the limits of traditional techniques. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.