A simple method to derive minimal cut sets for a non-coherent fault tree

Abstract

Minimal cut sets (or prime implicants: minimal combinations of basic event conditions leading to system failure) are important information for reliability/safety analysis and design. To obtain minimal cut sets for general non-coherent fault trees, including negative basic events or multi-valued basic events, a special procedure such as the consensus rule must be applied to the results obtained by logical operations for coherent fault trees, which will require more steps and time. This paper proposes a simple method for a non-coherent fault tree, whose top event is represented as an AND combination of monotonic sub-trees. A “monotonic” sub-tree means that it does not have both positive and negative representations for each basic event. It is proven that minimal cut sets can be obtained by a conventional method for coherent fault trees. An illustrative example of a simple event tree analysis shows the detail and characteristics of the proposed method.