faultbased

Faultbased (often written fault-based) describes approaches that take faults or failures as the primary basis for analysis and reasoning. The term refers to methods that build conclusions about system behavior by identifying plausible faults, tracing their potential consequences, and prioritizing mitigation or verification around those fault scenarios. The idea is to shift focus from ideal operation to understanding how things can go wrong and how those failures propagate.

In engineering and safety contexts, faultbased thinking underpins techniques such as fault tree analysis and failure mode and effects analysis. These methods model potential faults, estimate their impact on system objectives, and identify controls to prevent, detect, or mitigate adverse outcomes. Faultbased reasoning helps prioritize resources, design redundant safeguards, and support independent safety assessments by making fault pathways explicit.

In software engineering, faultbased testing and analysis use knowledge of defect patterns and known fault types to guide test design. By targeting areas where faults are likely to occur or historically observed, teams aim to increase fault detection efficiency and improve software reliability. Faultbased diagnosis in systems engineering and operations similarly relies on observed symptoms to infer the most probable faults and their causes.

Limitations of faultbased approaches include dependence on a comprehensive, up-to-date fault taxonomy and sufficient data to quantify probabilities. Focusing too narrowly on known faults can overlook novel failures or complex interactions, potentially underestimating risk without complementary, model-based or exploratory analyses.

See also fault tree analysis, failure mode and effects analysis, fault diagnosis, reliability engineering, safety assessment.