LayMan: A Visual Interactive Tool to Support Failure Analysis in Embedded Systems

In embedded systems domain, Component Fault Tree (CFT) is one of the most common techniques used by experts to model failure scenarios, which depict all the possible situations that could lead the underlying system to an undesired state. These models are useful not only to show the failure relations between the system components but also the structural relations between these components. However, traditional layout approaches suffer from the cluttering problem while visualizing these models, especially in the case of large-sized graph in these models. In this work, we present a generic layering tool, called LayMan (Layout Manager), that visualizes CFT models depicting some failure scenarios using the compound graphs metaphor. For this, LayMan provides a natural focus+context visualization view of the underlying CFT model and leads to produce compact abstract representation of the failure scenario, which helps in navigating over the critical parts of the underlying failure scenario. A preliminary user study of our tool, conducted with 25 users, shows higher participants' acceptance level towards the tool and its approach.