Verification of Component Fault Trees Using Error Effect Simulations
This work addresses safety verification for complex safety-relevant systems, offering an incremental improvement by integrating existing analysis methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of safety assurance for complex systems by combining Component Fault Trees (CFTs) with Error Effect Simulation (EES) to reduce subjective assumptions and improve fault scenario determination, enabling early identification of safety goal violations and reduced assessment overhead.
The growing complexity of safety-relevant systems causes an increasing effort for safety assurance. The reduction of development costs and time-to-market, while guaranteeing safe operation, is therefore a major challenge. In order to enable efficient safety assessment of complex architectures, we present an approach, which combines deductive safety analyses, in form of Component Fault Trees (CFTs), with an Error Effect Simulation (EES) for sanity checks. The combination reduces the drawbacks of both analyses, such as the subjective failure propagation assumptions in the CFTs or the determination of relevant fault scenarios for the EES. Both CFTs and the EES provide a modular, reusable and compositional safety analysis and are applicable throughout the whole design process. They support continuous model refinement and the reuse of conducted safety analysis and simulation models. Hence, safety goal violations can be identified in early design stages and the reuse of conducted safety analyses reduces the overhead for safety assessment.