Safety analysis of autonomous systems by extended fault tree analysis

Safety is of major concern in many autonomous functions in automotive systems and aerospace. In these application areas, it is standard to use fault trees, and a natural question in many modern systems that include sub-systems like diagnosis, fault-tolerant control, and autonomous functions is how to include the performance of these algorithms in a fault tree analysis for safety. Many possibilities exist but here a systematic way is proposed. It is shown both how safety can be analysed and how the interplay between algorithm design in terms of missed detection rate and false alarm rate is included in the fault tree analysis. Examples illustrate analysis of diagnosis system requirement specification and algorithm tuning. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.