This article, titled “Fault tree analysis improvements: A bibliometric analysis and literature review“, was authored by Mohammad Yazdi, Javad Mohammadpour, He Li, Hong-Zhong Huang, Esmaeil Zarei, Reza Ghasemi Pirbalouti, and Sidum Adumene. It was published in Quality and Reliability Engineering International in 2023. The paper is an open-access article under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License.
The study aims to systematically review the state-of-the-art theoretical and empirical findings concerning Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) improvement from 2011 to 2021, using the Scopus database. While FTA is a widely used failure analysis technique that reveals potential pathways leading to system or component failure, it has been criticized for inherent shortcomings in its conventional form. Scholars, engineers, and practitioners have made attempts to improve FTA by addressing its deficiencies, but few works have reviewed and synthesized these improvement studies. This research fills that gap by conducting an in-depth investigation using statistical metadata analysis and a bibliometric study.
Key aspects and findings of the article include:
- Purpose and Scope: The study provides a comprehensive outlook on FTA improvement research to assist researchers, engineers, and practitioners in system safety and reliability analysis. It also identifies opportunities for worldwide cooperation and future research directions.
- Methodology:
- The review follows a four-stage framework: (i) defining keywords, (ii) collecting data, and (iii) analyzing metadata statistically and using bibliometrics.
- Keywords: A two-level structure of keyword searching was adopted, using “Fault Tree Analysis,” “Fault Tree,” or “FTA” as core keywords, combined with secondary keywords like “reliability,” “failure probability,” “risk analysis,” “system safety,” “preventive,” “mitigative,” or “control”.
- Data Collection: Data was collected from the Scopus database for the period between 2011 and 2021, limited to English language publications (Journal, Conference proceeding, Book series, and Book types), resulting in 7995 relevant articles after screening.
- Analysis Tools: VOSviewer and Biblioshiny (an R package) were used for bibliometric analysis to detect, analyze, and visualize trends and patterns.
- Results and Discussion:
- Publication Trends: The annual publications on FTA improvement topics show significant growth, especially after 2019.
- Leading Journals: Reliability Engineering & System Safety and Lecture Notes in Computer Science are the two leading journals in this field.
- Bradford’s Law: According to Bradford’s law, 40 sources published one-third of the 7995 publications in the FTA improvement area.
- Most Influential Authors:
- Most Productive (by publication quantity): Jianxiu Wang (137 articles), Yan-Feng Li (120 articles), and Yihuan Wang (117 articles).
- Highly Cited (by total citation and g-Index): Faisal Khan, Yang Liu, and Mohammad Yazdi received the highest total citations. Faisal Khan, Yang Liu, and Liudong Xing dominated in terms of g-Index.
- Collaborative Networks: The analysis identified five major cooperative clusters, illustrating research groups led by authors like Jianxiu Wang and H-Z Huang, with strong co-authorship links.
- Affiliation Analysis (Research Centers & Countries):
- Asia, particularly China, is the leading contributor in the FTA area.
- The top three major contributor countries by publications and citations are China, the USA, and the UK.
- The most influential research centers are the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Beihang University, and Beijing Jiaotong University.
- Hot Topics and Emerging Trends (Keywords):
- Keywords with notable prevalence include “Fault tree analysis,” “Risk assessment,” “Reliability analysis,” “Safety engineering,” “Fuzzy set theory,” “Decision making,” “Risk analysis,” “Failure analysis,” and “Uncertainty analysis”.
- Key areas of FTA development integrate concepts like “Fuzzy Set Theory,” “Markov Process,” “Bayesian Network,” “Optimization,” and “Monte Carlo Methods” to address the shortcomings of conventional FTA.
- “Decision Making,” “Risk Analysis,” “Uncertainty Analysis,” and “Bayesian Networks” are highlighted as four major hot topics integrated into improving the conventional FTA.
- Application Areas: The improved FTA has been commonly applied in Engineering (33%), Computer Science (17%), Mathematics (8.5%), Energy (6.7%), Environmental Science (5.1%), and Decision Sciences (3.9%).
- Financial Supporters: The National Natural Science Foundation of China is the most significant financial supporter, backing 1132 published papers in this field.
- Research Gaps and Opportunities: The study identifies several future research directions, including:
- Integrating FTA with operations research tools like multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) and multi-objective decision-making (MODM) to optimize intervention actions.
- Exploring more effective expert elicitation processes to treat linguistic terms in judgment for failure probability estimation, addressing subjective uncertainty.
- Developing prototype systems for FTA improvement methods to make complex computation processes more accessible and convenient for practitioners in diverse application domains.
In conclusion, this bibliometric analysis provides valuable insights into the dynamic evolution of FTA improvement research, highlighting influential contributors, emerging trends, and critical areas for future investigation.
Reference: Yazdi, M., Mohammadpour, J., Li, H., Huang, H.-Z., Zarei, E., Pirbalouti, R. G., & Adumene, S. (2023). Fault tree analysis improvements: A bibliometric analysis and literature review. Quality and Reliability Engineering International, 39(5), 1639–1659. https://doi.org/10.1002/qre.3271