An improved FMEA method based on the expert trust network for maritime transportation risk management

Abstract

The prosperity of international trade has driven the development of shipping. Thus, evaluating shipping risks can better avoid risks, improve shipping safety, and promote economic and cultural communication and development. Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), as a reliable technique, can be used to identify and analyse the risk of oil spills at sea and improve the stability of maritime transport. Considering the relationship among multi-experts and the influence of the leader, this study intends to improve the FMEA method from some perspectives. First, the multi-party expert trust network is constructed and the expert trust relationship is supplemented as a pre-processing of the FMEA method. Second, a expert dynamic opinion interaction model is constructed to show the evolution of risk assessment information among experts. Which demonstrates the trsut relationships among experts and the leader’s influence. Third, in this paper, the risk factor weights are determined by combining the different importance of multi-experts on risk factors and the maximizing deviation model, and the expert’s weight is determined by considering the experts’ relationships and risk assessment information. Moreover, to demonstrate the ambiguity and hesitation in expert evaluations, and show more assessment information, the hesitant fuzzy sets are employed in this paper. And the effectiveness and superiority of the improved FMEA method is demonstrated through case study and further discussion. The improvements of the FMEA method can help improve the efficiency of the risk assessment, protect the marine ecological environment, and safeguard the interests of investors.