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Deterministic Common‐Cause Failure
According to [1], common‐cause failures (CCFs) are “A subset of dependent events in which two or more component fault states exist at the same time, or in a short time interval, and are direct results of a shared cause.” There are two types of shared root causes or common causes (CCs): external causes and internal causes. Examples of external causes include floods, lightning strikes, earthquakes, sudden changes in environments, malicious attacks, design mistakes, power‐supply disturbances, human errors, radiations, computer viruses, etc. Internal causes are mainly propagated failures (PFs) or destructive effects like fire, overheating, short circuit, blackout, or explosions originating from some component within the system, which may destroy or incapacitate other system components.
CCFs typically happen in systems that are designed with redundancy techniques based on the use of s‐identical components [2]. It...