Fast Dynamic Fault Tree Analysis by Model Checking Techniques

Abstract

This paper presents a new state-space generation approach for dynamic fault trees (DFTs) that exploits several successful reduction techniques from the field of model checking. The key idea is to aggressively exploit the DFT structure—detecting symmetries, spurious nondeterminism, and don't cares. Benchmarks show a gain of more than two orders of magnitude in terms of state-space generation and analysis time. This fast, scalable approach is complemented by an approximative technique that determines bounds on DFT measures by a partial state-space generation. This is shown to yield another order of magnitude gain while guaranteeing tight error bounds.