Introduction to Formal Concept Analysis and Its Applications in Reliability Engineering

Abstract Formal Analysis of Concepts (FCA) is a method of data analysis that helps to study the relationship between a set of objects and a set of attributes (the formal context). FCA not only allows detecting data groups (concepts) and their graphical visualization, but also extracting rules that could reveal the underlying structure of the analyzed context. The main idea of this paper is to present the fundamentals of FCA and how it can be used in reliability engineering problems. To this aim, examples in reliability engineering, from both the literature and authors’ experience, have been selected for analysis. Comments on the new insights provided by FCA are also highlighted. Finally, the results from the examples selected show that other reliability areas could benefit from using an FCA-based approach.