Conception of Repairable Dynamic Fault Trees and resolution by the use of RAATSS, a Matlab® toolbox based on the ATS formalism

Abstract

Dynamic Fault Tree (DFT) is a well-known stochastic technique for conducting reliability studies of complex systems. At the state of the art, existing tools (both academic and commercial) do not fully support DFT with repairable components and repeated events, lowering the penetration of this powerful technique in real industrial applications (e.g., industrial processes and plants, computer, electronic and network applications). One of the main reasons limiting the attractiveness of DFT is that, originally, DFTs were conceived without repairable components; only recently few related works have started to deal with a formal semantic, which would avoid undefined behavior and misinterpretation of DFT. Other researchers have tackled the problem by introducing extensions of the original Fault Trees (FTs) technique like Boolean Driven Markov Processes (BDMPs) and Generalized Fault Trees (GFTs). However, despite they consider repairable systems and repeated events, we have found that the introduction of a different formalism with more complex features has again limited the penetration of these powerful methods in real applications. The target of this work is the original DFT technique. Starting from the state of the art, a set of standardized rules that frame the behaviors of dynamic gates are designed and a well-defined semantic for repairable-DFT is drawn through the application of a novel formalism, the Adaptive Transitions System (ATS). The proposed theoretical framework is afterward used to code a software tool, RAATSS, for the resolution of extended, repairable-DFT. Moreover, this work introduces some novel concepts regarding the modeling of a system by a DFT and provides a basic hint of the ATS capabilities to describe interdependencies in complex system.