Ontology for computer-aided fault tree synthesis

The fault tree is a technique of high importance for reliability analysis in a industrial process. This paper describes an application that was developed for the automatic fault tree synthesis. In order to do so, the knowledge about industrial processes was structured through the development of a domain ontology. With this ontology is possible to represent the relationship between each component of the system and all its failure situations. Once the knowledge is structured in an ontology, an automatic procedure is executed to create a Fault Tree. The proposal was validated with a water tank system and allowed the construction of its fault tree quickly and efficiently.