Course Aim

This 4-hour Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) Course teaches students how to use fault trees to either model system reliability performance (based on component reliability characteristics) or help us identify the root causes of failure. Fault trees visually represent our understanding of how faults progress to failure, helping us do things like warranty period determination, reliability prediction, or conduct Root Cause Analysis (RCA). This means that fault trees can either help ‘measure reliability’ or ‘improve reliability’ through identifying likely failure ‘root causes’ that can be designed out of the system.

Fault trees are often parts of larger proactive reliability engineering activities like Failure Mode and Effects Analyses (FMEAs) and Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analyses (FMECAs). This means that FTA can be used to prevent problems, including issues that may introduce production costs and delays. If failure is defined as any event where we fail to meet our customer or user expectations, fault trees can also help robust, customer-centric design. This means we prioritize those features that matter the most to our customers, and we incorporate really simple design changes very early in the production lifecycle to become or remain an industry leader.

Students who design, manufacture or need to otherwise manage any sort of product or equipment will benefit from this course, along with managers who need to make business decisions based on reliability characteristics.

Course Outline

Introduction | Using fault trees to MODEL system reliability | Modelling complex system reliability | Using fault trees to ANALYZE system reliability | Common cause failure | Complex system reliability analysis exercise | Fault trees and Root Cause Analysis (RCA) | Robust, customer-centric design | Fault trees and cut sets | Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) – the procedure | Fault trees pros and cons

Course Material

The following resources will be provided to attendees of this course:

1. An editable PDF course workbook