Automatic Generation of Failure Mechanism Propagation Scenario via Guided Simulation and Intelligent Algorithm

Failure scenarios, which form the basis for accident scenarios, need to be studied to describe the failure behavior of complex systems. This paper proposes a hybrid intelligent method that combines the A* intelligent algorithm with the breadth-first search algorithm to automatically generate the failure scenario of a complex system with the failure scenario tree, while simultaneously calculating the occurrence probability of each failure path and of the whole system. The simulation is guided by the failure behavior rules generated based on expert knowledge. A case study of a power supply system with a warm standby subsystem is conducted. This system is also a multi-state system. The obtained results show that the proposed automatic reasoning can identify key failure scenarios that induce system failure, which can be helpful in the decision-making process.