FUZZY FAULT-TREE ANALYSIS FOR STRUCTURAL SAFETY

A tool that can be used to assess structural safety is fault tree anal ysis (FTA), which depends primarily on quantitative information. Howev er, in many cases, safety assessment of civil engineering structures i s based on subjective judgement. To improve the traditional FTA, the a uthors use the fuzzy set concept and introduce fuzzy fault tree analys is (FFTA). The development and potential application of FFTA operators (gates) are elaborated. Several example and an illustration are prese nted to justify the usefulness of FFTA. (C) 1996 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.