Risk assessment based on failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) and WASPAS methods under probabilistic double hierarchy linguistic term sets

Abstract

Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is regarded as an efficient tool in identifying and eliminating system failures and important tool in safety and reliability analysis. However, the traditional FMEA method has some drawbacks, for example, in the process of risk assessment, traditional FMEA method usually ignores the influence factors of weight. Simultaneously, when represent risk assessment information, crisp numbers and fuzzy sets cannot represent complex linguistic information forms accurately. Moreover, the traditional FMEA method ranks risk failures through simple product. Thus, based on these disadvantages, this paper aims to present an improved FMEA method combines with the Weighted Aggregates Sum Product Assessment (WASPAS) method and weight determination method to address the risk assessment problems under probabilistic double hierarchy linguistic (PDHL) environment. In assessment process, the probabilistic double hierarchy linguistic term sets (PDHLTSs) can indicate the probability distribution as a linguistic tool to describe the information reasonably and precisely. The contribution s of this paper can be incarnated as below. Firstly, the PDHLTSs are utilized to provide the linguistic information of failure modes and construct risk evaluation model in risk assessment. Secondly, FMEA method is combined with WASPAS method to overcoming some drawbacks existing in traditional FMEA such as without consideration of the weight of three aspects in Severity (S), Occurrence (O) and Detection (D) and too simple to evaluate the risk factors using Risk Priority Number (RPN) values. Meanwhile, in response to the issue of traditional FMEA method neglecting expert weights, weight determination method is established based on the SNA method under the PDHL context. Additionally, the FMs are ranked through the multi-attribute decision-making method WASPAS, and the final risk ranking result is obtained. Finally, the proposed method is applied to the marine risk assessment faced in the development of marine economy. Based on the assessment results, suggestions are given for the risk problems. In addition, we also carried out sensitivity analysis and accuracy analysis on the evaluation results. At the same time, comparison analysis with existing methods is given to illustrate the superiority of the proposed method.