Fault Tree Analysis (FTA)

Reliability happens at the point of DECISION

Reliability doesn’t just happen. Following standards, doing what worked 10 years ago or any other approach to reliability engineering that doesn’t focus on what your system is today won’t make reliability happen.

Fault trees are great at modeling system reliability. They are one of several tools that can help you turn what you know about component or subsystem failure characteristics into an understanding of system reliability characteristics. Which lets you measure reliability.

But measuring reliability is one thing. Improving reliability is a much bigger thing.

Good reliability decisions are based on 
knowing HOW your system will fail

Fault trees are a great Root Cause Analysis (RCA) tool. They can really help you and your team identify the potential causes of failure, which then focuses your investigation on what really happened.

But it is much better to prevent failures from occurring. Making your first design a reliable design means you need to know how your system will fail … from the first day of design.

Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) is a great 
tool for working this out

Course Description and Overview

The 4-hour, 11-module Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) Course teaches you how to use fault trees to achieve important outcomes supporting reliability performance.

Fault trees are visual representation methodologies that represent our understanding of how faults progress to a state of failure. 

Fault trees can be used to model system reliability where the reliability performance characteristics of components are used to determine system reliability performance characteristics. This allows us to model Time to Failure (TTF) at a system level if we have a good understanding of component TTF. This can then be used to inform things like warranty period determination or reliability at any point in usage.

Fault trees can also be used from the perspective of Root Cause Analysis (RCA). This usually occurs when we have observed a failure (or undesirable event) and want to ‘collectively brainstorm’ a series of explanations as to why it occurred. Fault trees used in this way can be used to identify likely ‘root causes’ that can either be the subject of further investigation or be designed out of the system. Fault trees used in this context support ‘reliability improvement’ more than ‘reliability measurement.’ 

Fault trees in this way can be used in a fundamentally more valuable context where we focus on preventing problems like failure before they occur. Fault trees used in this way are often parts of larger proactive reliability engineering activities like Failure Mode and Effects Analyses (FMEAs). If failure is defined as any event where we fail to meet our customer or user expectations, fault trees can help us do robust, customer-centric design. This is where we prioritize what features matter the most to our customers, and we incorporate really simple design changes very early in the production lifecycle to become or remain an industry leader.

Students who design, manufacture, or need to otherwise manage any sort of product or equipment will benefit from this course. FTA can be used for modeling TTF and informing key business plan decisions. FTA can be used to identify root causes of failure – both in the past and in the future. This means that FTA can be used to prevent problems, including issues that may introduce production costs and delays. FTA can be used to identify the VITAL FEW problems and issues our product, systems or services need to focus on.

Medium or Delivery Mode

This FTA Course is made up of 

11 lessons

that take you through the fundamentals of FTA, broken down into ‘three’ perspectives: system reliability modeling; RCA; and robust customer-centric design. These modules are based on an example that is iteratively developed throughout the course, with students completing exercises and questions in the workbook.

There is a total of 

4 hours of lessons.

This course will be delivered through

Self-paced video lessons.

So, regardless of where you find yourself in life, you 
will be able to do this course when it suits you.

Here is what you get. You get

1-year access

There will always be new developments in reliability engineering, and we will keep finding better ways to tell the story. 
So, as we make module updates, you will continue to get access to the course for one year from the date of purchase.

Then there is

 Ongoing expert Q&A.

I will be available to answer your questions for 12 months after completion of the course. See the course Materials tab to find contact options.

Who is your teacher? Dr. Chris Jackson

Dr Jackson holds a Ph.D. and MSc in Reliability Engineering from the University of Maryland’s Center of Risk and Reliability. He also holds a BE in Mechanical Engineering, a Masters of Military Science from the Australian National University (ANU) and has substantial experience in the field of leadership, management, risk, reliability and maintainability. He is a Certified Reliability Engineer (CRE) through the American Society of Quality (ASQ) and a Chartered Professional Engineer (CPEng) through Engineers Australia.

Dr Jackson is an Accendo Reliability Thought Leader. Was the inaugural director of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA’s) Center of Reliability and Resilience Engineering and the founder of its Center for the Safety and Reliability of Autonomous Systems (SARAS). He has had an extensive career as a Senior Reliability Engineer in the Australian Defence Force and is the Director of Acuitas Reliability Pty Ltd.

He has supported many complex and material systems to develop their reliability performance and assisted in providing reliability management frameworks that support business outcomes (that is, making more money). He has been a reliability management consultant to many companies across industries ranging from medical devices to small satellites. He has also led initiatives in complementary fields such as systems engineering and performance-based management frameworks (PBMFs). He is the author of two reliability engineering books, a co-author of another, and several journal articles and conference papers.

What you will receive

Access to all 4 hours of lesson videos

The comprehensive electronic course notes are an interactive PDF document that allows you to take notes using your computer or tablet.

Direct access to Chris for questions about the course content or its application.

Technical support for any issue accessing or viewing the course content from Accendo Reliability.

Student Learning Objectives

Students who complete this course will be able to do the following:

• Describe fault trees and how they are constructed
• Understand the different perspectives from which fault trees are used and how this affects their employment
• Identify which decisions may benefit from FTA, and which perspective is relevant
• Construct fault trees that model system reliability
• Understand ‘logic gates’ and how they are included in a fault tree
• Understand basic system reliability configurations that include parallel, series, ‘k out of n’ configurations
• Integrate fault trees with other modeling methodologies including Reliability Block Diagrams (RBDs), success trees, Event Trees (ETs) and other fault trees
• Analyze system reliability using a fault tree system reliability model and component reliability performance characteristics
• Model basic dependent failure scenarios including Common Cause Failure
• Understand the different redundancy configurations represented by fault tree ‘AND’ gates that include load sharing and switching systems
• List key limitations of FTA software
• Construct a fault tree that models ‘causality’ to help identify potential root causes of failure (both past and future)
• Identify potential root causes of observed failure using FTA (as part of RCA)
• Identify potential root causes of potential failure using FTA (as part of FMEA)
• Design robust, customer-centric products, systems and services using FTA based on customer expectation
• Understand system ‘cut sets’ and how they relate to reliability performance characteristics
• Identify ‘cut sets’ from a fault tree that models system reliability
• Create FTA strategies that efficiently and effectively using teams (as part of a group activity)
• List the pros of FTA to help identify when fault trees can support a specific decision
• List the cons of FTA to help identify when fault trees can NOT support a specific decision

Learning Resouces

All students will need to have a computer or laptop with speakers, a microphone and the capability of hosting Zoom ^TM video conferencing software. You will also need to prepare yourself to be an ‘online student’ and make sure that wherever you are, you have set yourself up for learning. More help can be found at the How to be a Successful Online Student page.

You should have a pen and note-taking paper. You do not need any textbooks to undertake this course, but if you are interested in learning more about reliability engineering, then we recommend Reliability Engineering and Management.  

You will also need access to Microsoft PowerPoint for a class exercise. You will be required to overlay certain statistical plots as part of a class exercise.

We also highly recommend becoming a member at accendoreliability.com. This is a free resource with podcasts, webinars, articles and books that can help you remain up to date with reliability engineering developments. 

There is no assessment or exam you have to pass in order to complete this course.