FMEA was formally introduced in the late 1940s for military usage by the US Armed Forces. Later, it was used for aerospace/rocket development to avoid errors in small sample sizes of costly rocket technology. FMEA enables the team to design those failures out of the system with the minimum of effort and resource expenditure, thereby reducing development time and costs. It is widely used in manu...

The goal of quality and reliability systems is the same-to achieve customer satisfaction. Quality and reliability are synonymous. A system cannot be reliable if it does not have high quality. Likewise, a system cannot be of high quality if it is not reliable. The quality performance of a firm is often assessed by the reliability of the firm's equipment or machinery. If a system is unreliable, i...

Signalling, a complex system is one of the most important infrastructures of railway service. The performance of railway signalling system depends on the functioning of a number of subsystems, such as panel, cable, relay, point and point machine, trackcircuit, signal, back indication, point-drive card, signal-drive card, and level crossing gate. Railway signalling system plays an important role...

Diagnosis, i.e., fault localization in case of observing an unexpected behavior, is an important practical problem. During the past decades researchers have suggested several approaches for using models of the systems directly for identifying the root causes of failure. This model-based diagnosis approaches are either based on retaining consistency or on abduction. Despite their advantages both...

Increasingly complex systems lead to an interweaving of security, safety, availability and reliability concerns. Most dependability analysis techniques do not include security aspects. In order to include security, a holistic risk model for systems is needed. In our novel approach, the basic failure cause, failure mode and failure effect model known from FMEA is used as a template for a vulnera...

Industrial plants are subjected to very dangerous events. Therefore, it is very essential to carry out an efficient risk and safety analysis. In classical applications, risk analysis treats event probabilities as certain data, while there is much penurious knowledge and uncertainty in generic failure data that will lead to biased and inconsistent alternative estimates. Then, in order to achieve...

Functional safety analysis (FSA), that is checking whether a designed artifact will perform safely even under the presence of failing components, has gained significant importance in different areas, including aeronautic and automotive systems. The same applies to failure-modes-and-effects analysis (FMEA) and fault-tree analysis (FTA) as the major contributing processes. FSA is laborand time-co...