NASA Root Cause Analysis Tool (RCAT)

About this technology

Overview

The NASA Root Cause Analysis Tool (RCAT) has been designed to facilitate the analysis of anomalies, close calls, and accidents and also identify the appropriate corrective actions to prevent recurrence. The software provides an analyst with a quick, easy-to-use, accurate, and repeatable method to perform and document root cause analysis, identify corrective actions, perform trending analysis, and generate usable data for probabilistic risk assessment. All possible causes of accidents-hardware, software, the environment, weather, natural phenomena, external events, human error-can be incorporated into the timeline and fault/causal factor trees. The software features an intuitive logic diagramming capability and uses standard terminology, definitions, and symbols.