A practical method for accurate quantification of large fault trees

Abstract

This paper describes a practical method to accurately quantify top event probability and importance measures from incomplete minimal cut sets (MCS) of a large fault tree. The MCS-based fault tree method is extensively used in probabilistic safety assessments. Several sources of uncertainties exist in MCS-based fault tree analysis. The paper is focused on quantification of the following two sources of uncertainties: (1) the truncation neglecting low-probability cut sets and (2) the approximation in quantifying MCSs. The method proposed in this paper is based on a Monte Carlo simulation technique to estimate probability of the discarded MCSs and the sum of disjoint products (SDP) approach complemented by the correction factor approach (CFA). The method provides capability to accurately quantify the two uncertainties and estimate the top event probability and importance measures of large coherent fault trees. The proposed fault tree quantification method has been implemented in the CUTREE code package and is tested on the two example fault trees. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.