Towards an Automated FMEA Assistant

Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA) is an important part of the design process for a large number of complex systems. However, current techniques for FMEA are largely manual, and tend to be slow and tedious. The FMEA procedure itself is usually carried out by experts whose time is expensive. For these reasons, any system which can help automate some aspects of the process are likely to be extremely valuable. This paper describes some work in progress to produce an expert system which can assist an engineer in the FMEA process by emulating some of the reasoning which an expert uses. The current application domain is automobile electrical systems, though the architecture of the system is extensible.