Matrix-based multi-hierarchy fault tree generation and evaluation

Due to increasing product complexity, variance and stricter safety regulations there is a need to improve safety analyses and to shift safety considerations to early stages of design. The fault tree analysis is one traditional method applied to safety analyses. Its major limitations are that it requires detailed system knowledge and involves high manual efforts. To shift it to the early stages it is necessary to improve efficiency and to cope with abstract concepts. This paper therefore, improves a matrix-based approach to automatically generate fault trees to solve the named challenges. It extends it by integrating multi-hierarchy models and enabling the automated generation of AND-gates. By that, it provides a preliminary FTA tailored to the phase of system design. It identifies critical system elements and allows the comparison of alternative concepts.