A number of improvements have been made to the Desktop Fault Insertion tool within eXpress, allowing this this feature to be used in a wider array of diagnostic validation scenarios. Additional fault insertion options have been added both to the dialog and the report. Several improvements have also been made to the DFI search dialog.
Fault Insertion Options
Several options have been added to provide greater control over fault insertion. The new settings appear on the Faults/Sequence panel of the Desktop Fault Insertion Options dialog:
You can now filter inserted faults by severity (so that only failure modes that ropagate to an end effect of a certain minimum severity are inserted) or by Attribute (so that only failure modes with a given Attribute Test limit are inserted). This feature—which impacts both explicit fault selection and randomly-generated faults—allows you to focus diagnostic validation efforts on more critical failures, or failures of a certain type.
When inserting random faults, you can now specify the minimum number of random faults to be included in each inserted failure combination. Previously, you could only specify the maximum number of faults in each inserted combination.
By default, random fault insertion now works in “shuffle” mode, which prevents faults from being inserted more than once until all other faults have been inserted (or until the DFI dialog has been closed and opened again). This is particularly useful in conjunction with another new feature (also enabled by default)—the weighting of “random” faults by failure probability. With this option, faults with a higher probability of failure will tend to be inserted before faults that are less likely to occur. When weighting fault insertion by failure probability, it is important that “shuffle” mode be enabled as well; otherwise, the same high-probability faults may be inserted over and over again.
Together, these new options allow you to customize Desktop Fault Insertion in eXpress to suit the specific needs of your project.
