Hello
A fault tree analysis is inter alia used in mechanical engineering where people analyze every mechanical component and check what could happen if it failed. Next to this they have lists "failure rates" for mechanical components.
When it comes to software however, it is IMO extremely hard to know how the software reacts when it "fails". It could literally crash or just enter the field of "undefined behaviour" (eg array going out of bound suddenly) without you actually realizing it. Next to this you have no idea of failure rates for software "components".
So how do people manage to do an in-depth fault tree analysis for software (not just a high level analysis...)?
I have tried looking online but there were IMO not many concrete and clear examples. Performing software testing just allows you to check the proper behaviour of your software, but this is not like an analysis you perform allowing you to pin-point which parts of your software (eg which functions etc) may have a higher chance of leading to issues
Hi everyone, I was sitting in the middle of a very slow moving course on process safety a few days ago, and we were talking about fault tree analysis. I think it could be a useful tool in certain aspects of worldbuilding because it works backward from some known outcome, so I thought I'd share the basic idea here for you guys.
Basically, you pick the outcome you want to analyze. Say I know that in my world I want one of my empires to fall, but I don't know how that would happen; all of the worldbuilding I've done so far suggests the empire is secure. So that's the top of your tree, and now you go down one level and imagine the immediate causes that could have lead to that. Maybe the Emperor died and there was a power vacuum, maybe the kingdom was invaded and overwhelmed, or etc. As many possible causes as you can (or want to) think of. Then you do the same thing down one more level, repeat, and continue down until you get to nodes that don't make sense to break down anymore (which is kind of a judgement call).
One interesting thing about this is that you can assign probabilities to each of the nodes to try to figure out what possible paths would be most likely (which is not to say those are always the paths you need to go with). You can also use logical operators to combine events: say for my kingdom to be invaded, the army would need to be unable to fight OR unwilling to fight AND the border wall would need to be compromised. This is how disasters tend to happen in real life: many different things go wrong all at once (for related or unrelated reasons) and suddenly you have Three Mile Island or Bhopal/Union Carbide.
I'm thinking this method would work well for creating believable a believable history (or alternate histories!) for a world. Wikipedia has more information on FTA here. Let me know what you all think, is this useful or is it more work than it's worth?
The project addresses the lack of free, open-source cross-platform probabilistic risk analysis tools (fault trees, event trees, etc). Most of the current code is about implementing PDAG, BDD, ZBDD, Markov chains.
It has been my playground to learn modern C++, Qt5, and Python, so I'd love to hear your critique and suggestions. There's project coding standards for your judgement (no intention to start religious wars though :).
The project is still in its infancy, and there's a lot (e.g., GUI, dynamic systems, risk network) to work on. New developers and contributions are very much welcome!
P.S. I need a co-maintainer for Fedora packaging.
TrU^St mE Br0! It's ^BuLliSH
My bf (23M) and I (24F) had had an argument one evening walking home from a friends house. (There was no alcohol involved in this situation) Things escalated, and eventually he got so angry he punched a nearby tree. He hit it decently hard and it bruised his hand. In his anger, he told me that I had driven him to hurt himself. Once we had got home and things had calmed down, I told him this wasnt okay. He apologized but I dont think he realises why im so upset by this. Should I be worried that this has happened?
