Abstract

RIVERO OLIVA, José de Jesús; TORRES VALLE, Antonio; SALOMON LLANES, Jesús  and  PERDOMO OJEDA, Manuel. Fault tree evaluation using an EXCEL worksheet. Energética [online]. 2018, vol.39, n.1, pp. 56-61. ISSN 1815-5901.

The present paper was dedicated to the evaluation of fault trees through an EXCEL worksheet. The determination of the Minimal Cut Sets (MCSs) was accomplished performing all possible combinations of the basic events that take part of the tree. The method prevents the calculation from collapsing due to a combinatorial explosion. The available memory is never a limitation. It was applied the factorization of non-repeated events, a recursive method for the generation of the events combinations and an ordering scheme giving priority to the components which are more repeated and appear closer to the top gate. The EXCEL worksheet determines the most important MCSs, the system failure probability, and the components importance measures. Instantaneous unavailability analysis is also possible. The results for two representative fault trees are presented. They were resolved in a reasonable time, showing an adequate performance for industrial applications of moderate complexity.

Keywords : fault trees; Excel sheet; minimum cut.

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