[SystemSafety] Which software for very basic FTA?

[Brent Kimberley]

Fyi.  Dot has also useful when "reverse-engineering" in-production relays and BLOBs.
-----Original Message-----
From: David MENTRE <dmentre at linux-france.org>
Sender: systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 11:55:00 
To: systemsafety at techfak.uni-bielefeld.de<systemsafety at techfak.uni-bielefeld.de>
Subject: Re: [SystemSafety] Which software for very basic FTA?

Hello,

Thank you for the suggestions and for correcting me that I want to do
_qualitative_ Fault Trees.

Regarding openFTA, I tried the windows installer on my Win7 machine
but the installer seems to block at "Installing..." phase (well, it
crashed the first time and blocked twice afterwards). Anyway, Peter's
comment was not very encouraging to try harder to use this tool.

Regarding Excel tricks for drawing AND and OR gates, well, I would
prefer to avoid that. ;-)

Regarding UML and GSN tools, I had a look at a UML/SysML tool I had at
hand (Enterprise Architect). I found no direct way to draw fault trees
(but there are a lot of diagrams, so I might have missed it). It is
certainly possible to tweak the tool to draw AND and OR gates but for
little gain over a PowerPoint approach IMHO. I also looked quickly at
Eclipse eco-system but found nothing.

Regarding dot (from GraphViz), I'm using this tool for some drawings.
But to maintain my fault tree I would need to do a lot of manual
editions in a .dot file which is not very convenient (to say the
least). I could also write a simple program to generate the .dot file
from the fault tree description, but it would become complicated for
automatic event numbering (keep the same numbering in case of tree
change) and for printing. However this approach could allow easy
versionning (put the program in the VCS) and change management (do a
simple diff).

Regarding Saphire, the NDA part is a blocker.

For now, I'll stick to my Excel spreadsheet and use PowerPoint (or
LibreOffice) for graphical fault trees. PowerPoint offers easy drawing
of AND and OR gates and can keep connected links if some drawing parts
are moved. Trees will be obviously grouped into printable pages.
However, I would lose automatic numbering of events, coherency checks
(sub-trees correctly related to a upper trees) easy versionning and
change management.

I am still open to other suggestions if that pops up. For example,
maybe proprietary tools have some trial capabilities that could suite
my needs?

Best regards,
david
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