Operation safety of complex industrial systems. Forward-looking analysis and reliability databases

The forward-looking analysis of systems failure consists in identifying the conditions that may lead to failures and to foresee their consequences on the reliability, maintainability, availability and safety of systems at the design stage or at the operation stage. It is performed from various information, the selection and analysis of which allows to design a system model. The essential information is: a description of the real system (physical and functional structures), the characteristics of the system components and of the interactions between them (failure modes and their consequences), the relations between the system and its environment, and the consideration of human errors at the exploitation step. Content: 1 - steps of an operation safety analysis; 2 - functional analysis methods: FAST, RELIASEP, SADT, IDEFO, APTE and other methods; 3 - Forward-looking analysis methods: qualitative methods, mixed and quantitative methods, human factors; 4 - reliability databases. (J.S.)