Systematic failure mode and effect analysis using a hybrid multiple criteria decision-making approach

Abstract

Failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) is a widely used approach to identify the potential failure modes, the causes for their occurrence and their possible effects of a product, process and service for improvement. Due to the shortcomings of the conventional risk priority number method, a number of alternative failure analysis models have been developed in the literature. However, most of the improvements have not taken into account the interrelations among failure modes, and thus do not hold good for complex systems with many subsystems or components. Additionally, previous researches often evaluated the risk of failure modes by independently considering the risk factors occurrence (O), severity (S) and detection (D), although they are more likely to affect each other in actual situations. In this paper, we present a new systematic FMEA using a hybrid multiple criteria decision-making approach to enhance the risk assessment capability of the traditional FMEA. A numerical example is included to illustrate the proposed risk priority model and the results are compared with other existing methods to further demonstrate its advantages.