Towards a unified definition of Minimal Cut Sequences

The growing complexity of systems increases the complexity of reliability modelling and implies the need to model both the dynamics of systems and the reparability of components. The qualitative reliability analyses aim at finding the minimal representation of all the scenarios of failures and repairs of the components, leading to the system failure. This minimal representation is the set of Minimal Cut Sequences. In order to provide a formal definition of these specific scenarios, whatever the risk analysis model used, this paper proposes coherence rules for dynamic and repairable systems whose dysfunctional scenarios are modelled by a finite automaton.