Comparison With Other Analytical Methods
FTA is a deductive, top-down method aimed at analyzing the effects of initiating faults and events on a complex system. This contrasts with failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), which is an inductive, bottom-up analysis method aimed at analyzing the effects of single component or function failures on equipment or subysystems. FTA is very good at showing how resistant a system is to single or multiple initiating faults. It is not good at finding all possible initiating faults. FMEA is good at exhaustively cataloging initiating faults, and identifying their local effects. It is not good at examining multiple failures or their effects at a system level. FTA considers external events, FMEA does not. In civil aerospace the usual practice is to perform both FTA and FMEA, with a failure mode effects summary (FMES) as the interface between FMEA and FTA.
Alternatives to FTA include dependence diagram (DD), also known as reliability block diagram (RBD) and Markov analysis. A dependence diagram is equivalent to a success tree analysis (STA), the logical inverse of an FTA, and depicts the system using paths instead of gates. DD and STA produce probability of success (i.e., avoiding a top event) rather than probability of a top event.
Read more about this topic: Fault Tree Analysis
Famous quotes containing the words comparison with, comparison, analytical and/or methods:
“In everyone’s youthful dreams, philosophy is still vaguely but inseparably, and with singular truth, associated with the East, nor do after years discover its local habitation in the Western world. In comparison with the philosophers of the East, we may say that modern Europe has yet given birth to none.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“But the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“I think it is a wise course for laborers to unite to defend their interests.... I think the employer who declines to deal with organized labor and to recognize it as a proper element in the settlement of wage controversies is behind the times.... Of course, when organized labor permits itself to sympathize with violent methods or undue duress, it is not entitled to our sympathy.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)