Failure Mode and Effect Analysis Under Uncertainty: An Integrated Multiple Criteria Decision Making Approach

Nowadays, failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) is a widely used reliability analysis technique for products, processes, and services because of its relative simplicity. The conventional risk priority number method, however, has been criticized as having many limitations, such as in the assessment of failure modes, the weighting of risk factors, and the prioritization of failure modes. In this paper, we aim to develop a new risk priority model for FMEA by integrating hesitant 2-tuple linguistic term sets and an extended QUALIFLEX approach. The concept of hesitant 2-tuple linguistic term sets is first presented to express various uncertainties in the assessment information of FMEA team members. Borrowing the idea of grey relational analysis, a multiple objective optimization model is constructed to determine the relative weights of risk factors with incomplete weight information. The extended QUALIFLEX approach with an inclusion comparison method is then suggested to determine the risk ranking of failure modes identified in FMEA. Finally, the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed FMEA are demonstrated through a case study, and the results show that the new risk priority approach is useful and flexible for handling complicated FMEA problems and can yield a reasonable and credible priority ranking of failure modes.