ReFASE: Rethinking Failure Analysis for Safer Engineering

Modern safety systems often fail without clearly revealing who or what was responsible. This project develops new tools that link two currently separate ways of explaining failures: Fault Trees, widely used in engineering, and Structural Causal Models, used in science and AI for “what-if’’ reasoning. Fault Trees show how events combine to cause a failure but cannot assess responsibility or harm; Structural Causal Models can, but are rarely applied in engineering. By attempting this novel integration, the goal is to explore when the combined approach yields insights that support safer and more accountable system design.