Concise Guide to Fault Tree Analysis

Fault tree analysis is key tool in risk analysis. It is a widely used industry standard with applications in amongst others, the aerospace, automotive, chemical and nuclear industries.

Society depends on complex engineering systems such as (nuclear) power plants, airplanes, and data centers, and this dependency is only increasing with developments like smart grids and self-driving cars. In this light, risk analysis is essential to ensure that these systems are reliable. Fault tree analysis is a powerful, commonly used tool for such risk analysis. This book provides a comprehensive overview of what fault trees are and how they are applied, looking at their role in risk management, illustrating techniques for their construction, and describing their analysis in both practical and mathematical terms.

Topics and features:

• Delivers a crystal-clear overview of techniques for building and analyzing fault trees
• Offers numerous illustrative examples of methods and industry applications
• Provides solid mathematical descriptions for exact and approximate analysis
• Includes an overview of modern extensions of fault trees
• Examines and explains the whole fault tree analysis process, including the application of results

With its comprehensive overview of the practice of fault tree analysis, this book is eminently suitable for industrial and academic professionals in risk management. Furthermore, the overview of analysis techniques will be of great interest to researchers working to advance the field.

Prof. Dr. Mariëlle Stoelinga is a professor of risk management for high-tech systems, both at the Radboud University Nijmegen, and the University of Twente, in the Netherlands. She is a world-leading expert in quantitative risk analysis. Stoelinga wrote more than 150 scientific articles on this topic, several which were awarded prestigious scientific prizes.

Stoelinga also acquired a number of prestigious research grants:  Grants from the Dutch National Science Agenda and NWO KIC to work on Predictive Maintenance,  an NWO Top grant, and ERC consolidator grant for the integration of safety & cybersecurity risks.

For many years, Stoelinga has been the scientific programme leader  Risk Management Master, a part-time MSc programme for professionals. She holds an MSc and a PhD degree from Radboud University Nijmegen, and has spent several years as a post-doc at the University of California at Santa Cruz, USA.

Dr.Enno Ruijters holds an MSc in Operations Research (Maastricht University, the Netherlands) and a PhD in Formal Methods and Tools (University of Twente, the Netherlands). His PhD work focusses on fault tree analysis. He published a leading article describing the state of the art in fault tree analysis (> 600 citations). He developed a formalism for extending fault trees to analyze systems experiencing gradual wear-and-tear and repairs, as well as a technique for quantitatively analyzing such Repairable Fault Trees using Rare Event Simulation. The novel fault tree modeling and analysis techniques were extensively validated using various case studies in collaboration with the Dutch national railway industry (who co-funded the PhD project). Since 2019, he is working as a software engineer at BetterBe B.V.

Dr Pavel Krčál got his MSc from Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, and defended his PhD thesis at Uppsala University, Sweden, both in Computer Science. His specialization in Formal Methods gave him theoretical and practical skills in analyzing (large) mathematical models of technical systems. Since then, he is working for a private company (RiskSpectrum AB) which develops a software tool for Probabilistic Safety Assessment (event tree/fault tree analysis) in the nuclear safety domain. This tool is used in approximately 60% of all civil nuclear power plants worldwide and in the position of a world-leading platform contributes to shaping the way in which these analyses are performed.
Pavel focuses on the modeling and analysis methods, i.e., ways of building dependability models of technical utilities by fault trees and other formalisms and on algorithms and tools for their analysis. Besides research and development work, he mentors clients in advanced dependability topics. He is also regularly publishing on advances in fault tree analysis at scientific conferences.