Development of automatic fault tree synthesis system using decision matrix

Fault trees synthesis, the basis for fault tree analysis (FTA), serves as a powerful tool for risk analysis. It has become a trend to accomplish computer-assisted fault tree synthesis in the field of system safety engineering because conventional manual construction of fault trees can be extremely time-consuming and vulnerable to human errors. This paper expounds upon a fault tree synthesis information system (FTSIS) developed by means of decision matrix for the purpose of its application to process plants, where the objective system is decomposed into a series of system components whose cause-effect models are constructed and stored in the relational database and transferred into decision matrix. The fault tree is synthesized automatically after the decision matrix is fully searched in FTSIS, the availability of which has been verified after it was put into effect successfully.