Overview

Our objective in this unit is to take the simple series and parallel systems covered in MUDE (material can be found here) and practice applying it to real problems. This requires taking a real system and breaking it down into smaller sub-systems and components. In our applications we will focus on:

• binary events/components (either safe or failed)

• constructing a system out of (mostly) simple series and parallel sub-systems

• primarily statistically independent components

• observing when dependence may occur and checking how it would influence the computed failure probability under a statistically independent assumption

In all cases, our goal will be to compute system failure probability, \(p_{f,sys}\).

The primary tool for completing this analysis is the Fault Tree, which is introduced on the next page.