Abstract
Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is a well-known approach for correlating the failure modes of a system to their effects, with the objective of assessing their criticality. The criticality of a failure mode is traditionally established by its risk priority number (RPN), which is the product of the scores assigned to the three risk factors, which are likeness of occurrence, the chance of being undetected and the severity of the effects. Taking a simple “unweighted” product has major shortcomings. One of them is to provide just a number, which does not sort failures modes into priority classes. Moreover, to make the decision more robust, the FMEA is better tackled by multiple decision-makers. Unfortunately, the literature lacks group decision support systems (GDSS) for sorting failures in the field of the FMEA.In this paper, a novel multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method named FlowSort-GDSS is proposed to sort the failure modes into priority classes by involving multiple decision-makers. The essence of this method lies in the pair-wise comparison between the failure modes and the reference profiles established by the decision-makers on the risk factors. Finally a case study is presented to illustrate the advantages of this new robust method in sorting failures.
Highlights
The reduction of the non-quality costs is a main concern in all production and service systems because it increases the customer fidelity and reduces the after-sales costs
The criticality assessment of the failure modes in Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is carried out by calculating their risk priority numbers, which are given by the product of the likeness of occurrence (O), the severity of the effects (S), and the chance of being undetected (D), each one measured on a 1-10 scale, as follows: RPN = O × S × D
This paper proposes a group decision support system, named FlowSort-group decision support systems (GDSS), for sorting the failure modes into priority classes
Summary
FlowSort-GDSS is an extension of the FlowSort method, when several decision-makers are involved in the sorting decision process. FlowSort was developed by Nemery & Lamboray (2008) as an adaption of the ranking method PROMETHEE II. The possibility to use FlowSort for group decisions was first mentioned in an oral communication (Nemery, 2008). FlowSort-GDSS is composed of the three following steps: 1) Decision-makers are selected; alternatives, evaluation criteria, classes and their characteristics are defined. 2) This stage compares one alternative at the time with the reference profiles on each criterion for each decision-maker. The comparison step is described in the section 3.3. 3) The last stage assigns the alternatives to a class defined in step 1, on the basis of their global scores achieved in step 2.
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