Consensus-based failure mode and effect analysis in group decision-making with incomplete weights of risk factors: Case study of stereotactic body radiation therapy for lung cancer

Abstract

Failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) is a widely used management technique to identify potential failure modes in products, processes, systems, and services to assign limited resources for implementing improvement efforts. For the FMEA with a number of experts, the experts may take different influences on the decision-making process due to the difference between individual rationality and cognition and the influence of social relations. Besides, incomplete weights of risk factors are vital to capturing the fuzziness of experts’ evaluation. Therefore, this paper proposes a consensus-based FMEA method to explore that how cooperative relationship network of experts, the consensus process, and incomplete weight information of risk factors in FMEA influence the decision-making process. First, a consensus reaching process considering cooperative relationships between experts, the self-confidence of experts, and minimum adjustment of expert opinion is proposed to derive a collective evaluation of group. Afterward, the stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis method is integrated with the gained and lost dominance score method to deal with incomplete weights of risk factors in the FMEA. The proposed method is employed in a case study about ranking the failure modes of stereotactic body radiation therapy for lung cancer patients. The robustness and feasibility of the proposed method are validated by comparative analysis.