Improvement of the Reliability Graph with General Gates to Analyze the Reliability of Dynamic Systems That Have Various Operation Modes

The safety of nuclear power plants is analyzed by a probabilistic risk assessment, and the fault tree analysis is the most widely used method for a risk assessment with the event tree analysis. One of the well-known disadvantages of the fault tree is that drawing a fault tree for a complex system is a very cumbersome task. Thus, several graphical modeling methods have been proposed for the convenient and intuitive modeling of complex systems. In this paper, the reliability graph with general gates (RGGG) method, one of the intuitive graphical modeling methods based on Bayesian networks, is improved for the reliability analyses of dynamic systems that have various operation modes with time. A reliability matrix is proposed and it is explained how to utilize the reliability matrix in the RGGG for various cases of operation mode changes. The proposed RGGG with a reliability matrix provides a convenient and intuitive modeling of various operation modes of complex systems, and can also be utilized with dynamic nodes that analyze the failure sequences of subcomponents. The combinatorial use of a reliability matrix with dynamic nodes is illustrated through an application to a shutdown cooling system in a nuclear power plant.