Compositionality of Component Fault Trees

Abstract

In order to deal with the rising complexity of safety-critical systems, model-based systems engineering (MBSE) approaches are becoming popular due to their promise to improve consistency between different views of the system model. Component Fault Trees (CFTs) are one particular technique to integrate the well-known Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) with a model of the system. CFTs decompose the specification of fault propagation on component level, which results in smaller, easier to manage models and leads to a safety analysis view that is consistent with the system model. However, although CFTs gain more and more popularity, their semantics is not well defined and the compositionality of CFTs is not formally proven to the best of our knowledge.