Integrating Fault Tree Analysis with Event Ordering Information

Fault tree analysis is a traditional and well-established technique for analyzing system design and robustness. Its purpose is to identify sets of basic events, called cut sets, which can cause a given top level event, e.g., a system malfunction, to occur. In this paper we present an algorithm that extracts ordering information, i.e., finds out possible ordering constraints which are required to hold between basic events in a cut set. The algorithm is completely automatic, and has been incorporated into a more general framework, based on model checking techniques, for automatic fault tree generation and analysis.