The Development of the Integrated System Failure Analysis and Its Applications

This paper reviews the development and applications of the Integrated System Failure Analysis approach. The Integrated System Failure Analysis integrates multiple existing techniques like functional failure analysis and fault propagation simulation to enable early design stage analysis of complex systems. The integrated physics-based modeling allows identifying failure propagation paths across hardware, software, and their interactions. The paper summarizes the progressive enhancement of the Integrated System Failure Analysis and its application to various systems including a holdup tank, secondary loop of a nuclear power plant, experimental breeder reactor, and fracturing systems. Different extensions of the Integrated System Failure Analysis are discussed like integration with fuzzy logic for refined risk analysis and incorporation of ontologies for diverse fault modeling. In addition, the paper extracts references citing foundational Integrated System Failure Analysis papers to identify potential areas and systems where the Integrated System Failure Analysis could be further applied and developed like large-scale systems, cyber-physical systems, resilient systems, and critical infrastructure. An abstract analysis of the citing papers is conducted to categorize them by purpose and domain. This landscape analysis indicates directions for expanding the approach to new complex engineered systems and application domains.