''Pseudo-Boolean Approach to Solving Reliability Problems''



Suresh Rai

Jerry L. Trahan


ESREL'97, European Safety and Reliability Conf., (Lisbon, Portugal, July 1997)

Abstract:

This paper discusses a new approach to translate the Boolean expression representing the fault-tree or graph-model, G, of a system, which satisfies a reliability parameter, into a polynomial expression. We use a small set of rules to achieve this translation. These rules are not entirely Boolean, hence the approach is termed as pseudo-Boolean. It possesses the advantage of not needing to perform any Boolean simplification and of being quite general, being efficient in application to solving certain classes of expressions. Our comparison with existing techniques shows these merits of the pseudo-Boolean approach.