Patent Document ID: 8352399
Application ID: 13154734
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A method for failure analysis in a system, the method comprising: identifying at least one possible End Effect of failure in an object of the system; identifying N possible fault modes of the object; building an N×N interaction matrix of all possible fault modes; excluding from said interaction matrix and defining as single-point fault modes all fault modes that can cause said End Effect when occurring alone; excluding from the interaction matrix left after the previous excluding step and defining as double-point fault modes all fault modes that can cause said End Effect in combination with one other fault mode; and performing additional steps of excluding, wherein in each step of excluding, all fault modes that can cause said End Effect in combination with a number (n−1) of other fault modes are defined as n-point fault modes and excluded from the interaction matrix left after the previous excluding step, wherein the number (n−1) of other fault modes is one more than in the previous excluding step, the performing of excluding steps ceases after excluding all fault modes that can cause said End Effect in combination with all the other fault modes left in the interaction matrix.