In the previous blog post, we talked about the theory behind the FTA. In this post, we are going to do a concrete example of an FTA A quick example: "Vehicle does not steer" To see how the pieces fit together, take a safety-critical top event from an automated vehicle: the vehicle does not steer. Loss of steering can happen in several independent ways, so directly beneath the top event sits an OR gate: any one branch alone is enough to cause it. Fig: FTA example The first branch is a...

Before a passenger jet, a nuclear reactor, or a car's braking system is ever trusted with human lives, engineers sit down and ask a simple question: what would have to go wrong for this to fail catastrophically? Not "will it fail," but "what exact combination of smaller faults would it take." Answering that question rigorously is the job of Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), one of the most widely used safety and reliability techniques in engineering. What is an FTA ? Fault Tree Analysis is a...

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, or FMEA, is one of engineering's most important safety tools, also and one of its most tedious. In safety-critical industries like automotive and aerospace, building a single FMEA can take an experienced engineer weeks, and most of that time is spent not on analysis but on documentation: typing out failure modes, copying effects and causes, and arguing over risk scores. At SafeLink Innovations, we asked a different question: what if an AI could read the...