Designing safe products and systems is critical to reducing accident risk and minimizing product liability. There are various reliability and quality analysis methodologies used to ensure safety including risk analysis techniques such as fault tree analysis (FTA) and others. We review introductory information about FTA, including what it is, its history, its uses, and its advantages. A review of qualitative and quantitative FTA results, including minimal cut sets (MCS), quantitative metrics such as unavailability, and importance measures, is included. The presentation concludes with guidance on how FTA results can be used to design inherently safer products and systems.

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