Reliability Analysis by Multilevel Flow Models: A Qualitative Analysis Method and Its Application for FTA Validation

Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) is a powerful analytical technique for analyzing system reliability and safety by enumerating any possible safety-critical failure modes, which is very useful for identifying the risks and weaknesses in the system. Therefore, FTA is widely applied to the safety evaluation of large-scale and mission-critical systems. However, the following problems are usually pointed out when building a fault tree for a complex system: 1) System modeling is a hard and time consuming work, and 2) FTA models are difficult to be validated. In this paper, we propose a new method for system reliability analysis based on Multilevel Flow Models (MFM) and Goal Tree-Success Tree (GTST) methods. We use Goal Tree (GT) methodology to model the target system at a higher and system level, and use the Success Tree (ST) together with MFM at a lower and functional level. In this way, modeling effort could be significantly reduced. In this paper, an algorithm is also presented to translate the GTST-MFM model into ST model based on which qualitative reliability analysis can be performed by the Fusell-vesely algorithm. In this paper, a Low Head Safety Injection System (LHSIS) is taken as a case study to exemplify how to apply our proposed GTST-MFM method to model the system and to validate fault trees directly built by deductive method.Copyright © 2009 by ASME