Advanced FMEA method based on interval 2-tuple linguistic variables and TOPSIS

Abstract Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is a widely used technique for identifying, evaluating, and eliminating potential failures in production, system, and process. The traditional FMEA ranks the failure modes according to risk priority numbers (RPN), which are obtained by the multiplications of the crisp values of risk factors, such as occurrence (O), severity (S), and detection (D). However, the traditional FMEA is criticized for mishandling uncertain information and calculating RPN unreasonably. To overcome the above deficiencies, this study presents an advanced FMEA method combined with interval 2-tuple linguistic variables (ITLV) and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). In the proposed method, the evaluations given by different FMEA members based on their different linguistic term sets are represented by ITLVs, which are feasible and valid variables to effectively deal with uncertain information. The TOPSIS method is used to rank the risk priorities of failure modes by comprehensively considering all of risk factors. Finally, an application case is provided to illustrate the validity and robustness of the proposed method.