The treatment of dependent failures in availability analyses Original Research Article

This short article will contribute to the development of an easy and handy formula, which enables instrumentation and control (I&C) practitioners to estimate conservatively the contribution of dependent failure to the overall unavailability of the integrated hardware–software safety-critical I&C-system. The desired formula fits in the existing methodology to quantify the unavailability of redundant hardwired I&C-systems. The methodology has been approved by licensing experts of nuclear facilities in Germany for two decades.