A Heuristic Methodology for Efficient Reduction of Large Multistate Event Trees

Abstract EN

This work proposes a new methodology for the management of event tree information used in the quantitative risk assessment of complex systems.

The size of event trees increases exponentially with the number of system components and the number of states that each component can be found in.

Their reduction to a manageable set of events can facilitate risk quantification and safety optimization tasks.

The proposed method launches a deductive exploitation of the event space, to generate reduced event trees for large multistate systems.

The approach consists in the simultaneous treatment of large subsets of the tree, rather than focusing on the given single components of the system and getting trapped into guesses on their structural arrangement.