The Free Technology Academy (FTA) is a programme of masterlevel courses on Free Software and Open Standards that publishes all of its materials as Open Educational Resources. The FTA is run through a virtual campus, entirely based on Free Software and implemented as part of a European project. The goal is to make the production of course materials economically sustainable. We surmise that peer ...

The increasing complexity of today’s vehicles gives drivers help with everything from adaptive cruise control to warning lights for low fuel level. But the increasing functionality also increases the risk of failures in the system. To prevent system failures, different safety analytic methods can be used, e.g., fault trees and/or FMEA-tables. These methods are generally performed manually, and ...

Over the last 50 years advances in technology have led to an increase in the complexity and sophistication of systems. More complex systems can be harder to maintain and the root cause of a fault more difficult to isolate. Down-time resulting from a system failure can be dangerous or expensive depending on the type of system. In aircraft systems the ability to quickly diagnose the causes of a f...

When a new system is developed, an evaluation of the system reliability should be carried out in order to determine whether the system is acceptable for an actual spot. Reliability of systems in a nuclear power plant is also analyzed to compare with regulatory criteria designed to ensure the availability of high-quality qualifications. There are several reliability analysis methods: the fault t...

This paper presents an algebraic framework allowing to algebraically model dynamic gates and determine the structure function of any Dynamic Fault Tree (DFT). This structure function can then be exploited to perform both the qualitative and quantitative analysis of DFTs directly, even though this latter aspect is not detailed in this paper. We illustrate our approach on a DFT example from the l...