In: Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems: 7th International Conference, KES 2003 Oxford, UK, September 3-5, 2003, pages 1265-1272. Volume 2773 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science --- Springer-Verlag, October 2003.
Abstract: In implementing any hazard analysis method, there is a need to reason deductively for identifying all possible fault origins that could lead to an undesirable consequence. Due to the complex time-variant cause-and-effect relations between events and states in sequential operations, the manual deduction process is always labor intensive and often error-prone. The theme of the present study is thus concerned mainly with the development of Petri-net based reasoning algorithms for automating such cause-finding procedures. The effectiveness and correctness of this approach are demonstrated with a realistic example in this paper.