Risk Evaluation in Failure Mode and Effects Analysis Based on Dempster-Shafer Theory and Prospect Theory

Abstract

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), as a very important safety and reliability analysis tool, has been extensively used for examining potential failures in products, processes, designs and services. In traditional FMEA, potential failure modes are determined and can be evaluated by Risk Priority Number (RPN), which is defined as the multiplication of the occurrence (O), severity (S), and detection (D). However, the traditional RPN has been criticized because of several deficiencies due to the uncertainty in FMEA. In this paper, a new risk evaluation method in FMEA based on Dempster-Shafer theory (D-S theory) and prospect theory is proposed to the Multi-criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem. D-S theory is used to express the fuzzy assessment information which may be imprecise and uncertain. Then, the fuzzy group assessment is transformed into a crisp value. Prospect theory is applied on risk evaluation and risk prioritizing. A numerical example is illustrated and shows the efficiency of the proposed method.