Minimal cut set/sequence generation for dynamic fault trees

This paper proposes a zero-suppressed binary decision diagrams (ZBDD) based solution for minimal cut set/sequence (MCS) generation of dynamic fault trees. ZBDD is an efficient data structure for combinational set representation and manipulation. Our solution is based on the basic ZBDD set manipulations (union, intersection, difference and product). Due to the nature of the ZBDD, our algorithm is more efficient than the algorithms based on the BDD, both in computation time and memory usage. In our solution, we also extend the concept of minimal cut set in static fault trees into minimal cut sequence (also with notation MCS) in dynamic fault trees. The is based on minimal cut set generation. It is also efficient compared with Markov model based methods. As an example, we apply our method to X2000 avionics architecture. The system is modeled using a dynamic fault tree and the minimal cut sets/sequences are generated and analyzed.