OpenPRA

OpenPRA: Open-Source Framework for Probabilistic Risk Assessment

By Mihai A. Diaconeasa

Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) is critical to all safety-critical domains, including transportation, industrial automation, medical devices, energy, and many more. PRA exploits well-known methods for evaluating the dependability and resilience properties of technical systems. These methods usually include classical event trees, fault trees, Bayesian networks, Markov chains, and their numerous extensions and combinations. Professional analytical toolsets, available in the market, support only a limited set of methods and, in most cases, cannot adequately describe sophisticated failure scenarios of modern, highly dynamic, autonomous, and intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems. R&D teams propose advanced analytical methods and tools. However, they are usually available in the form of proof-of-concept prototypes and only suitable for academic case studies. Thus, the PRA group, together with international partners, have started the OpenPRA initiative.

The OpenPRA initiative aims to provide a unique platform for integrating the multiple PRA methods and tools into a holistic, easy to use, and highly customizable framework.

We encourage all NCSU students to participate in the project. Available topics will appear on our website. This is an opportunity (i) to collaborate with other students from partner universities, (ii) improve your software development skills in C++, Python, Javascript/Typescript, (iii) design and implement analytical web-based software tools, (iv) attend several relevant seminars and workshops.

OpenPRA goals
  • Open source and free software supported by an international community.
  • Unified analytical environment with hybrid PRA models.
  • Collection of ready to use PRA models, solvers, transformers.
  • Automatic generation of PRA models from MBSE models.
  • User-friendly web interfaces, easy to extract risk insights.
  • Collection of examples from different domains with associated PRA guidelines.
  • Performance, scalability, and accuracy benchmarks.
Partners