Instructional Software for Reliability Estimation and Fault Tree Analysis

This paper describes a software tool to introduce fundamental concepts of reliability and fault tree analysis to engineering students. Students can fit common failure distributions to failure data. The data can be complete, singly censored, or multiply censored. The software computes distribution and goodness-of-fit parameters. The students can use the tool to validate hand calculations. Failure distributions and reliability values for various components can be identified and stored in a database. Various components and sub-systems can be used to build series- parallel or complex systems. The components data can also be used to build fault trees. The software tool can compute reliability of complex state independent and state dependent systems. The tool can also be used to compute failure probability of the top node of a fault tree. The software was implemented in Visual Basic with SQL as the database. It operates on the Windows 7 platform