A method and apparatus for analyzing the availability of a system, in particular of a safety critical system

摘要

An apparatus and method for analyzing the availability of a system comprising subsystems each having at least one failure mode with a corresponding failure effect on said system, said apparatus comprising a degraded mode tree, DMT, generation unit adapted to generate automatically a degraded mode tree, DMT, containing at least one degraded mode element representing a degraded system state of said system which deviates from a normal operation state of said system on the basis of a predetermined generic system meta model stored in a database comprising Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, FMEA, elements representing subsystems, failure modes, failure effects and diagnostic measures and a processing unit adapted to evaluate the generated degraded mode tree, DMT, for calculation of the availability of said system.