The mechanical generation of fault trees for reactive systems via retrenchment I: combinational circuits

Abstract

Abstract The manual construction of fault trees for complex systems is an error-prone and time-consuming activity, encouraging automated techniques. In this paper we show how the retrenchment approach to formal system model evolution can be developed into a versatile structured approach for the mechanical construction of fault trees. The system structure and the structure of retrenchment concessions interact to generate fault trees with appropriately deep nesting. We show how this approach can be extended to deal with minimisation, thereby diminishing the post hoc subsumption workload and potentially rendering some infeasible cases feasible.