Computation of Importance Measures Using Bayesian Networks for the Reliability and Safety of Complex Systems

Modern engineering systems have proven to be quite complex due to the involvement of uncertainties and a number of dependencies among the system components. Shortcoming in the inclusion of such complex features results in the wrong assessment of reliability and safety of the system, ultimately to the incorrect engineering decisions. In this paper, the usefulness of Bayesian Networks (BNs) for achieving improved modeling and reliability and risk analysis is investigated. The calculation of a number of Importance Measures with use of Fault Tree Analysis as well as BNs is provided for a complicated railway operation problem. The BNs based safety risk model is investigated in terms of quantitative reliability and safety analysis as well as for multi dependencies and uncertainty modeling.