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.

Keywords:

• failure mode and effect analysis
• DEMATEL
• AHP
• multiple criteria decision-making

Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful to the respected editor and the anonymous referees for their insightful and constructive comments, which helped to improve the overall quality of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 71671125 and 71402090), the NSFC Key Program (grant number 71432007), the National Social Science Foundation (grant number 15CGL003) and the Program for Young of Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning (grant number QD2015019).