FFORT: A benchmark suite for fault tree analysis

Abstract

This paper presents FFORT (the Fault tree FOResT): A large, diverse, extendable, and open benchmark suite consisting of fault tree models, together with relevant metadata. Fault trees are a common formalism in reliability engineering, and the FFORT benchmark brings together a large and representative suite of fault tree models. The benchmark provides each fault tree model in standard Galileo format, together with references to its origin, and a textual and/or graphical description of the tree. This includes quantitative information such as failure rates, and the results of quantitative analyses of standard reliability metrics, such as the system reliability, availability and mean time to failure. Thus, the FFORT benchmark provides: (1) Examples of how fault trees are used in various domains; (2) A large class of tree models to evaluate fault tree methods and tools; (3) Results of analyses to compare newly developed methods with the benchmark results. Currently, the benchmark suite contains 202 fault tree models of great diversity in terms of size, type, and application domain. The benchmark offers statistics on several relevant model features, indicating e.g. how often such features occur in the benchmark, as well as search facilities for fault tree models with the desired features. In addition to the trees already collected, the website provides a user-friendly submission page, allowing the general public to contribute with more fault trees and/or analysis results with new methods. Thereby, we aim to provide an open-access, representative collection of fault trees at the state of the art in modeling and analysis.