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Fault trees on a diet: automated reduction by graph rewriting

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Formal Aspects of Computing

Abstract

Fault trees are a popular industrial technique for reliability modelling and analysis. Their extension with common reliability patterns, such as spare management, functional dependencies, and sequencing—known as dynamic fault trees (DFTs)—has an adverse effect on scalability, prohibiting the analysis of complex, industrial cases. This paper presents a novel, fully automated reduction technique for DFTs. The key idea is to interpret DFTs as directed graphs and exploit graph rewriting to simplify them. We present a collection of rewrite rules, address their correctness, and give a simple heuristic to determine the order of rewriting. Experiments on a large set of benchmarks show substantial DFT simplifications, yielding state space reductions and timing gains of up to two orders of magnitude.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software Modeling and Verification, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Sebastian Junges & Joost-Pieter Katoen

  2. Formal Methods and Tools, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Dennis Guck, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Arend Rensink & Mariëlle Stoelinga

Authors
  1. Sebastian Junges
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  2. Dennis Guck
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  3. Joost-Pieter Katoen
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  4. Arend Rensink
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  5. Mariëlle Stoelinga
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sebastian Junges.

Additional information

Communicated by Cliff Jones, Xuandong Li, and Zhiming Liu

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Junges, S., Guck, D., Katoen, JP. et al. Fault trees on a diet: automated reduction by graph rewriting. Form Asp Comp 29, 651–703 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00165-016-0412-0

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