Evaluation of Wind Turbine Failure Modes Using the Developed SWARA-CoCoSo Methods Based on the Spherical Fuzzy Environment

Abstract

Accurately recognizing potential failures in the early stages of providing products or services can prevent the loss of investment and time and reduce the risk of safety hazards. Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is a conventional approach for detecting and prioritizing the probable failures of a product’s design or production process. Nevertheless, the traditional risk priority number (RPN) method has come under criticism for its deficiencies. This paper proposes a modified FMEA method based on fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) techniques to cope with the weaknesses of the previous methodologies and improve the primary method. The concept of spherical fuzzy sets (SFS) is utilized to address the vagueness and impreciseness of the information that allows the experts to have more freedom in making decisions by including membership, non-membership, and hesitation of fuzzy sets. Initially, the procedure of assigning weights to the RPN criteria is implemented with SFS step-wise weight assessment ratio analysis (SWARA). Then, the failure modes are ranked by the SFS combined compromise solution (CoCoSo) method. The effectiveness and practicality of the suggested approach are illustrated through a case study on the Manjil wind farm in Iran. Results show that the suggested model is more reliable and realistic to be utilized in the prioritization of failures than the common FMEA method or other integrated MCDM approaches.