A Survey of Function Failure Identification and Propagation Analysis Methods for System Design

In the context of model-based product and system design, the capability to assess the impact of potential component faults, undesired interactions, and fault propagation is important for design decision-making. Addressing these potential negative outcomes should occur as early in the design process as possible to enable designers to make impactful changes to the design. To this end, a set of tools and methods have been developed over the last 20 years that leverage a function-based approach assessing the potential faults and fault propagation and develop system health management strategies. These tools and methods must overcome challenges of high abstraction and satisfaction of safety or risk requirements with limited design specifications. This paper provides a detailed survey of a particular function-based analysis tool as a lens to understanding the challenges for other tools in this domain. Specifically, the development and evolution of the function failure identification and propagation framework (FFIP) is used as a lens to survey the challenges of this field. The objective of this paper is to explore the specific challenges and advancements of the FFIP framework and related tools that address similar modeling and analysis challenges. We provide an overall categorization and summary of the research efforts to date and identify specific known limitations and unaddressed challenges in the area of design-stage system risk and safety analysis.