Fault tree analysis is commonly used to assess the reliability of potentially hazardous industrial systems. The type of logic is usually restricted to AND and OR gates which makes the fault tree structure coherent. In non-coherent structures not only components’ failures but also components’ working states contribute to the failure of the system. The qualitative and quantitative analyses of suc...

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) covers many kinds of technologies, such as technology of sensor, embedded system, wireless communication, etc. WSN is different from the traditional networks in size, communication distance and energy-constrained so as to develop new topology, protocol, quality of service (QoS), and so on. In order to solve the problem of self-organizing in the topology, this pape...

As programmable logic controllers (PLCs) are often used to implement safety–critical embedded software, safety demonstration of PLC code is needed. In this paper, we propose a fault tree analysis technique on Function Block Diagrams (FBDs) which is one of the most widely used PLC programming languages. FBD is currently being used to develop Reactor Protection System (RPS) for a nuclear power pl...

To meet the real-time diagnosis requirements of complex systems, this paper presents a novel fault diagnosis framework based on dynamic fault tree and arithmetic circuit. It pays attention to meeting two challenges: model development and real-time reasoning. Specifically, we use a dynamic fault tree to model dynamic fault modes and calculate some quantitative parameters using algebraic techniqu...

This article introduces a new way of understanding subjective probability and its generalization to lower and upper prevision. Instead of asking whether a person is willing to pay given prices for given risky payoffs, we ask whether the person believes he can make a lot of money at those prices. If not—if the person is convinced that no strategy for exploiting the prices can make him very rich ...

We propose a formal approach for adding fault detection to software. An assertion-based formalism is used to represent specifications and verify completeness and consistency. This specifcation is used to generate aflowgraph, which is used to construct an exemplar-path tree. This representation is then used to generate an input set to exercise and verify the implementation. Previous software fau...

The ordering of basic events is critical to fault tree analysis on the basis of binary decision diagrams (BDDs). Many attempts have been made to seek an efficient ordering result with the aim of reducing the complexity of BDD. In this article, a new ordering method, namely, priority ordering method, is proposed. The new method takes into account not only the effects of the layers of fault tree ...

The current study applied a fault tree analysis to represent the causal relationships among events and causes that contributed to fatal falls in the construction industry. Four hundred and eleven work-related fatalities in the Taiwanese construction industry were analyzed in terms of age, gender, experience, falling site, falling height, company size, and the causes for each fatality. Given tha...

Safety is of major concern in many applications such as in automotive systems and aerospace. In these applications it is standard to use fault trees, and a natural question in many modern systems that include sub-systems like diagnosis, fault tolerant control and autonomous functions, is how to include the performance of these algorithms in a fault tree analysis for safety. Many possibilities e...

Even ifsofiware code is fault-free, hardware failures can alter value in memory, possibly where the code itself is stored, causing a computer system to reach an unacceptable state. Microprocessor systems are used to perform many safey and security functions where a design goal is to eliminate single-pointfailures such as these. One design approach is to use multiple processors, compare the outp...