Statistical Analysis of Common Cause Failure Events using ICDE Data

Analysis of Common Cause Failures (CCF) is an important element of the Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) of systems important to safety in a nuclear power plant. Based on the conceptualization of the CCF event, many probabilistic models have been developed in the literature. This paper utilizes a modern method, called "General Multiple Failure Rate Model", for the probabilistic modeling of CCF events. To estimate the parameters of the GMFR model, the Empirical Bayes (EB) method is adopted. A detailed case study is presented using CCF data for Motor Operated Valves (MOVs).