System Failure Analysis Through Counters of Petri Net Models

Abstract

Petri nets are a powerful technique widely used in the modeling and analysis of complex manufacturing systems and processes. Due to their capability in modeling the dynamics of the systems, Petri nets have been combined with fault tree analysis techniques to determine the average rate of occurrence of system failures. Current methods in combining Petri nets with fault trees for system failure analysis compute the average rate of occurrence of system failures by tracking the markings of the Petri net models. The limitations of these methods are that tracking the markings of a Petri net represented by a reachability tree can be very complicated as the size of the system grows. Therefore, these methods offer less flexibility in analyzing sequential failures in the system. To overcome the limitations of the current methods in applying Petri nets for system failure assessment, this paper expands and extends the concept of counters used in Petri net simulation to perform the failure and reliability analysis of complex systems. The presented method allows the system failures to be modeled using general Petri nets with inhibitor arcs and loops, which employs fewer variables than existing marking‐based methods and substantially accelerates the computations. It can be applied to real system failure analysis where basic events can have different failure rates. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Applications of Bayesian networks and Petri nets in safety, reliability, and risk assessments: A review

“…Failure rates of system components are assumed to be exponentially distributed. To overcome this limitation the same authors proposed a method in (Adamyan and He, 2003) and (Adamyan and He, 2004), which allows the use of inhibitor arcs and loops in PN model. They also use fewer variables than in earlier work to reduce computational complexity.…”

Quantitative Analysis of Dynamic Fault Trees Based on the Structure Function

“…These two approaches have been, respectively, implemented in the Windows 18 and Linux 19 version of the Drawnet tool. Finally, in 20 , all the gates of DFTs are converted into Petri nets, and counters are used to determine the number of times that each transition has been fired, and hence the average rate of occurrence of the system failure.…”

Reliability Modeling and Evaluation of Electric Vehicle Motor by Using Fault Tree and Extended Stochastic Petri Nets

“…The extended stochastic Petri net is a high level one; it has been used to establish models of reconfigurable manufacturing system and network attack due to its better information expression ability and dynamic description performance of process features [22,23]. Although some prior works [22][23][24] have proposed to use extended stochastic Petri nets to solve reliability issues of nitric acid reactor feed and reconfigurable manufacturing systems, they merely analyze the average failure rate/life time of system; the real-time probability analysis/reliability issues of the system are not yet addressed by using this method. Moreover, for reliability issue of electric vehicle motor, we cannot find reference to handle this issue by the extended stochastic Petri nets method to the best knowledge of the authors.…”