Obtaining Fault Trees Through SysML Diagrams: A MBSE Approach for Reliability Analysis

Reliability analysis provides fundamental results for the decision-making process regarding systems design, operation, and maintenance plans, but the growing complexity of systems has motivated the search for automated methods of reliability analysis. Although Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) is an effective and highly utilized technique for reliability analysis, it is very labor intensive and can become very complex to apply, to the point of needing automation. The goal of this paper is to develop a method of automated reliability analysis based on FTA, which fault trees are obtained by mapping SysML (System Modelling Language) diagrams in a novel structured procedure. SysML is a modeling language used in MBSE (Model-based Systems Engineering) to gather all the information about a system in a consistent and complete way, which is why it is used in this paper to develop the fault trees. The method is applied to a bearing lubrication system of a hydrogenerator and the obtained fault tree is presented.