Abstract
Failure mode and effects analysis is an important methodology, which has been extensively used to evaluate the potential failures, errors, or risks in a system, design, or process. The traditional method utilizes the risk priority number ranking system. This method determines the risk priority number by multiplying failure factor values. Dempster–Shafer evidence theory has been combined with failure mode and effects analysis due to its effectiveness in dealing with uncertain and subjective information. However, since the risk evaluation of different experts may be different and some even conflict with each other, Dempster’s combination rule may become invalid. In this article, for better performance of application of evidence theory in failure mode and effects analysis, a modified method is proposed to reassign the basic believe assignment taking into consideration a reliability coefficient based on evidence distance. We illustrate several numerical examples and use the modified method to obtain the risk priority numbers for risk evaluation in failure modes of aircraft engine rotor blades. The results show that the proposed method is more reasonable and effective for real applications.
Highlights
Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is an efficient approach used to define, identify, and eliminate known or potential failures and errors from system, design, or process.[1,2] This methodology is widely applied to several industry fields such as aerospace, engineering design, and manufacturing to gather important information.[3,4,5,6] FMEA can help analysts to identify known and potential failure modes and their causes and effects and help them to prioritize the identified failure modes
The priority of a failure mode is determined by the risk priority number (RPN), which is obtained by multiplying the values of occurrence (O), severity (S), and detection (D) of a failure mode
We proposed a method based on the second idea, that is, reassign the basic believe assignments (BBAs) using reliability coefficient with evidence distance[31] to solve the problem of conflicting
Summary
Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is an efficient approach used to define, identify, and eliminate known or potential failures and errors from system, design, or process.[1,2] This methodology is widely applied to several industry fields such as aerospace, engineering design, and manufacturing to gather important information.[3,4,5,6] FMEA can help analysts to identify known and potential failure modes and their causes and effects and help them to prioritize the identified failure modes. When experts give different and precise values of the risk evaluation factors, the basic believe assignments (BBAs) constructed by Yang et al.’s7 method become highly conflicting evidence which cannot be fused by Dempster’s combination rule directly.[27] Su et al.[28] proposed a modification of Yang et al.’s7 method, using uncertain reasoning method based on Gaussian distribution. This method can only be used to deal with conflicting situations.
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