Abstract
Failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) is a risk management technique frequently applied to enhance the system performance and safety. In recent years, many researchers have shown an intense interest in improving FMEA due to inherent weaknesses associated with the classical risk priority number (RPN) method. In this study, we develop a new risk ranking model for FMEA based on soft set theory and COPRAS method, which can deal with the limitations and enhance the performance of the conventional FMEA. First, trapezoidal fuzzy soft set is adopted to manage FMEA team members’ linguistic assessments on failure modes. Then, a modified COPRAS method is utilized for determining the ranking order of the failure modes recognized in FMEA. Especially, we treat the risk factors as interdependent and employ the Choquet integral to obtain the aggregate risk of failures in the new FMEA approach. Finally, a practical FMEA problem is analyzed via the proposed approach to demonstrate its applicability and effectiveness. The result shows that the FMEA model developed in this study outperforms the traditional RPN method and provides a more reasonable risk assessment of failure modes.
Highlights
Failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) is a proactive risk management technique commonly used to identify and eradicate potential failures, problems and errors from a system, design, process or service before they reach customers 1
In the traditional FMEA, the listed failure modes are normally ranked according to the risk priority number (RPN), which is a product of the risk factors occurrence
A number of other integrated approaches have been proposed to overcome the limitations of the traditional FMEA, including combining fuzzy VIKOR with combination weighting 10, TOPSIS method with rough set theory 16, and grey relational projection method with D numbers 34
Summary
Failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) is a proactive risk management technique commonly used to identify and eradicate potential failures, problems and errors from a system, design, process or service before they reach customers 1. In the traditional FMEA, the listed failure modes are normally ranked according to the risk priority number (RPN), which is a product of the risk factors occurrence. We contribute a novel risk priority approach based on soft set theory and COPRAS method to enhance the assessment capability of FMEA. To manage such situations where FMEA team members are hesitant in expressing their assessments over failure modes, the trapezoidal fuzzy soft set, a vital concept of soft set, is applied to deal with FMEA experts’ diverse risk assessments.
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