Analyzing the Reliability of a Personal Computer System using Fault Tree Analysis

Abstract

A system can be defined as a set of components interconnected to perform a given task. Such a system has a high possibility of failure compared to a single component, since it is a combination of different components consisting of different failure types. Thus, the analysis of failures of such systems should take into account both the time to failure and the type of the failure. The specialty in multiple failure type systems is that the failure occurrences yielding from different failure types cannot be regarded as independent from each other. Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) enables to address the problem of multiple failure types and it does not require the assumption of independence among failure types. A personal computer (PC) is made up of many interconnected components.The goal of this research is to provide an insight into using FTA for evaluating reliability of PC’s which have failed due to various types of hardware failures. In this study, suitable parametric distributions were identified for each of the failure types and were applied to a fault tree constructed to depict the failure pattern of PCs. In the literature this type of research is not found in many studies which use FTA. FTA identified that hard disk, power unit and VGA failures are the most significant failure causes irrespective of the brand while the most reliable computer brand was also identified.