Development of failure mode and effects analysis using fuzzy analytical network process

Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is a risk assessment tool that decreases potential failures in systems, processes, designs or services has been used in a wide range of industries. The conventional risk priority number (RPN) method has been criticised to have many deficiencies various risk priority models have been proposed in the literature to increase the performance of FMEA. In a traditional FMEA, for each failure modes, three risk factors of severity (S), occurrence (O), delectability (D) are evaluated a risk priority number (RPN) is obtained by multiplying these factors. Significant efforts have been made in FMEA literature to overcome the shortcomings of the crisp RPN calculation. In this study, a fuzzy approach, allowing experts to use linguistic variables for determining pair-wise comparisons, was considered for FMEA by applying fuzzy preference priority (FPP) technique integrated with fuzzy analytical network process (ANP). The case study demonstrated the applicability of the model in FMEA under fuzzy environment.