4 research outputs found
Safety system design optimisation
This thesis investigates the efficiency of a design optimisation scheme that is
appropriate for systems which require a high likelihood of functioning on demand.
Traditional approaches to the design of safety critical systems follow the preliminary
design, analysis, appraisal and redesign stages until what is regarded as an acceptable
design is achieved. For safety systems whose failure could result in loss of life it is
imperative that the best use of the available resources is made and a system which is
optimal, not just adequate, is produced.
The object of the design optimisation problem is to minimise system unavailability
through manipulation of the design variables, such that limitations placed on them by
constraints are not violated.
Commonly, with mathematical optimisation problem; there will be an explicit
objective function which defines how the characteristic to be minimised is related to
the variables. As regards the safety system problem, an explicit objective function
cannot be formulated, and as such, system performance is assessed using the fault tree
method. By the use of house events a single fault tree is constructed to represent the
failure causes of each potential design to overcome the time consuming task of
constructing a fault tree for each design investigated during the optimisation
procedure. Once the fault tree has been constructed for the design in question it is
converted to a BDD for analysis.
A genetic algorithm is first employed to perform the system optimisation, where the
practicality of this approach is demonstrated initially through application to a High-Integrity
Protection System (HIPS) and subsequently a more complex Firewater
Deluge System (FDS).
An alternative optimisation scheme achieves the final design specification by solving
a sequence of optimisation problems. Each of these problems are defined by
assuming some form of the objective function and specifying a sub-region of the
design space over which this function will be representative of the system
unavailability.
The thesis concludes with attention to various optimisation techniques, which possess
features able to address difficulties in the optimisation of safety critical systems.
Specifically, consideration is given to the use of a statistically designed experiment
and a logical search approach
Optimal safety system performance
This paper investigates the efficiency of a design
optimization scheme which is appropriate for systems which
require a high likelihood of functioning on demand. Traditional
approaches to the design of safety critical systems follows the
preliminary design, analysis, appraisal and redesign
stages until what is regarded as an acceptable design is
achieved. For safety systems whose failure could result in loss
of life it is imperative that the best use of the available
resources is made and a system which is optimal not just
adequate is produced.
The methodology presented in the paper retains the
commonly used fault tree method to analyse the individual
system designs. By the use of house events a single fault tree
is constructed to represent the failure causes of each potential
design to overcome the time consuming task of constructing a
fault tree for each design investigated during the optimization
procedure.
The final design specification is acheved using a
genetic algorithm to perform the optimization with the
constraints incorporated by penalising the fitness of infeasible
designs. To demonstrate the practicality of the method
developed it has been applied to a High Integrity Protection
System (HIPS)
Genetic algorithms in optimal safety system design
This paper describes a design optimization scheme for systems that require a high likelihood of functioning on demand. For safety systems whose failure could result in loss of life it is imperative that the best use of the available resources is made and that a system which is optimal and not just adequate is produced
Genetic algorithms in optimal safety system design
Genetic algorithms in optimal safety system desig