Fault tree reliability analysis via squarefree polynomials

Abstract: Fault tree (FT) analysis is a prominent risk assessment method in industrial systems. Unreliability is one of the key safety metrics in quantitative FT analysis. Existing algorithms for unreliability analysis are based on binary decision diagrams, for which it is hard to give time complexity guarantees beyond a worst-case exponential bound. In this paper, we present a novel method to calculate FT unreliability based on algebras of squarefree polynomials and prove its validity. We furthermore prove that time complexity is low when the number of multiparent nodes is limited. Experiments show that our method is competitive with the state-of-the-art and outperforms it for FTs with few multiparent nodes.