Abstract
An exposition is made of the method of moments for the uncertainty analysis of fault trees with statistically correlated failure data. Exact formulas for the mean and variance of the top-event probability, as well as accurate formulas for its third and fourth central moments, are derived. An approximate analysis of partial correlation is also given. Two test problems are studied, the first of which demonstrates a good agreement between the present method and the Monte Carlo method for a case of total correlation, and also reveals that the effect of correlation can be quite significant. The second test problem studies the effect of partial correlation for different parameters of the basic events.