Safety analytics on site
Introduction
Fault tree analysis (FTA) is a top-down, deductive failure analysis in which an undesired state of a system is analyzed using Boolean logic to bring together a series of low-level events. This analysis method is primarily used in the fields of safety engineering and reliability engineering to understand how systems can fail, to identify the best ways to reduce a risk, or to determine (or begin to understand) failure rates. events of a safety accident or a (functional) failure of a particular level of a system. FTA is applied in the aerospace industry,[1] in nuclear engineering, in the chemical and process industry,[2][3][4] in the pharmaceutical industry,[5] in the petrochemical industry and in other high-risk industries, but it is also applied in fields as diverse as the identification of risk factors related to the social service failure system,[6] same as in software engineering, for debugging purposes. It is closely related to the cause elimination technique used to detect code errors").[7].
In the aerospace industry, the general term "system failure condition" is used for the "undesired state" or "higher state" of the fault tree. These conditions are classified based on the severity of their effects. The most severe conditions require the most extensive analysis of the fault tree.
Use
Fault tree analysis can be used to:.
History
Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) was originally developed between 1970 and 1971 at Bell Laboratories by H. A. Watson, under a contract with the Ballistics Systems Division of the United States Air Force to evaluate the Launch Control System of the Minuteman I Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM).[8][9][10][11] The use of fault trees has since gained widespread support and is a often used as a failure analysis tool by reliability experts.[12] Following the first published use of FTA in the Minuteman I Launch Control System Study in 1962, Boeing and AVCO expanded the use of FTA to the complete Minuteman II system in the years 1963-1964. FTA received extensive coverage at a Systems Safety Symposium in Seattle in 1965, sponsored by Boeing and the University of Washington.[13] Boeing began using FTA for civil aircraft design around 1966.[14][15].
Later, within the US Army, the application of FTA for use with fuzes was explored by the Picatinny Arsenal in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1976, the US Army Materiel Command incorporated FTA into an Engineering Design Manual on Design for Reliability. successors, now with the Defense Technical Information Center (Reliability Information Analysis Center and now Defense Systems Information Analysis Center, ) have published documentation on the FTA and reliability block diagrams since the 1960s.[18][19][20] MIL-HDBK-338B provides a more recent reference.[21].