Many industries are involved in areas of research, design, and manufacturing that necessitate increasing their application of advanced computer techniques. The expansion of high technology fields such as aviation, micro-electronics, and energy-related industries make the assurance of system safety and reliability imperative to the future growth and success of these industries. Risk assessments are now performed at many stages in the design and operation of complex systems to assure reliable operation and also to reduce design and maintenance costs. The application of powerful integrated computer systems for reliability analysis is necessary to respond to the computational needs of engineers in complex design situations. Fault tree and event tree analyses are key elements in reliability studies. The accident sequences defined by the event trees provide the analyst with criteria for system failure as well as the context that describes the conditions under which the system is required to perform. Reliability analyses of large systems involving many failure causes are too complex to be analyzed without the assistance of a computer, not only to perform the fault tree analysis, but also to organize and present the information to the analyst. Use of list processing techniques widely used in artificial intelligence will be investigated in evaluating reliability of large systems represented by fault trees. Use of LISP will allow advanced techniques in reliability calculations to be utilized to produce powerful reliability software. These algorithms will be applicable to the evaluation of any large, complex system and will benefit many areas of engineering system design.
