FAULT-TREE ANALYSIS WITH FUZZY GATES

Fault tree analysis is an important tool analyzing system reliability. Fault trees consist of gates and events. Gates mean relationships bet ween events In fault tree analysis, AND, OR gates have been used as ty pical gates but it is often difficult to model the system structure wi th the two gates because in many cases we have not exact knowledge on system failure mechanism in early design stage. In this paper, we appl y the fuzzy sets theory to modeling the fuzzy system structure, propos e the new procedure to calculate the system reliability and a new impo rtance index of basic events. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.