A Systematic Approach to Sensitivity Analysis of Fault Tolerant Systems in NMR Architecture

A fault tree illustrates the ways through which a system fails. It states different ways in which combination of faulty components result in an undesired event in the system. Being used in phases such as designing and exploiting industrial systems، and the designers able to evaluate the dependability attributes such as reliability، MTTF and sensitivity. In addition، in the mentioned ability، the fault tree is a systematic method for finding systems bottlenecks and weakness point. In spite of its extensive use in evaluating the reliability of systems، fault tree is rarely used in calculating sensitivity. In the last decade، few researches has been conducted in this field، however these methods are not applicable to large scale systems and are not systematic. This paper provides a systematic method for evaluating system sensitivity through fault tree. Then، it introduces sensitivity of NMR architecture as one of the common structures of fault tolerance which is used for enhancing systems’ reliability، safety and availability in industry. This article presents a comprehensive and parameterized formula for NMR structure''s sensitivity. The presented method can be a great help for designing and exploiting reliable systems engineers in systematic and instant calculation of sensitivity by means of fault tree.