Fuzzy fault tree approach for analysing the fuzzy reliability of a gas power plant

Abstract

In conventional reliability analysis, the failure probabilities of the components of a system are treated as exact values. It is often difficult to obtain data for failure probabilities under changing environmental conditions. Hence, fuzzy sets are used to analyse the fuzzy system reliability, where a fuzzy number represents the reliability of each component. In this paper, on the basis of the failure modes for the components of gas power plant, a fault tree is constructed and then an expression for probability of failure of gas power plant, in terms of minimal cut sets, is obtained using minimal cut set approach. Due to uncertainty in the collected data, all the failure probabilities are represented by trapezoidal fuzzy numbers and fuzzy reliability of gas power plant is evaluated using the obtained expression and fuzzy arithmetic. On the basis of the obtained result it is concluded that reliability result obtained from this approach is more flexible than the traditional approach.