8

FAULT TREES

Sensitivity of estimated failure probabilities to problem representation

Baruch Fischhoff, Paul Slovic and Sarah Lichtenstein

DECISION RESEARCH, A BRANCH OF PERCEPTRONIES EUGENE, OREGON

© 1978 THE AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION INC.

Abstract

Fault trees represent problem situations by organizing “things that could go wrong” into functional categories. Such trees are essential devices for analyzing and evaluating the fallibility of complex systems. They follow many different formats, sometimes by design, other times inadvertently. The present study examined the effects of varying three aspects of fault tree structure on the evaluation of a fault tree for the event “a car fails to start.” The fault trees studied had four to eight ...

Get Judgment and Decision Making now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.