Sebastian Junges Receives Best Computer Science Thesis Award

Sebastian Junges from the Chair of Software Modeling and Verification at RWTH Aachen has received the national Computer Science Faculty Day Award 2015, which is awarded for outstanding final theses. Junge's Master's thesis is entitled "Simplifying Fault Trees by Graph Rewriting."

 

Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) is a widely used technique for the reliability and safety analysis of complex systems as used in aero- and astronautics or in rail transport.

Such an analysis makes it possible to determine the likelihood of a system failure in a certain time period. In order to make it possible to incorporate complex component interactions into the analysis, the extended formalism of dynamic fault trees has been developed.

Analyzing dynamic fault trees is computationally intensive. Junges's Master's thesis introduces a method which simplifies the fault tree with the help of tree transformations. This makes it possible to make safety analyses using dynamic fault trees much faster and significantly reduce computer memory consumption.

The thesis was jointly supervised by Prof. Joost-Pieter Katoen from RWTH Aachen and Dr. Mariëlle Stoelinga from the University of Twente, the Netherlands.