New Failure Mode and Effects Analysis: An Evidential Downscaling Method |
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| Authors: | Yuxian Du Xi Lu Xiaoyan Su Yong Hu Yong Deng |
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| Affiliation: | 1. School of Computer and Information Science, Southwest University, Chongqing, China;2. School of Hanhong, Southwest University, Chongqing, China;3. School of Electronics and Information Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China;4. School of Engineering, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA;5. Institute of Business Intelligence and Knowledge Discovery, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China |
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| Abstract: | Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is an engineering and management technique, which is widely used to define, identify, and eliminate known or potential failures, problems, errors, and risk from the design, process, service, and so on. In a typical FMEA, the risk evaluation is determined by using the risk priority number (RPN), which is obtained by multiplying the scores of the occurrence, severity, and detection. However, because of the uncertainty in FMEA, the traditional RPN has been criticized because of several shortcomings. In this paper, an evidential downscaling method for risk evaluation in FMEA is proposed. In FMEA model, we utilize evidential reasoning approach to express the assessment from different experts. Multi‐expert assessments are transformed to a crisp value with weighted average method. Then, Euclidean distance from multi‐scale is applied to construct the basic belief assignments in Dempster–Shafer evidence theory application. According to the proposed method, the number of ratings is decreased from 10 to 3, and the frame of discernment is decreased from 210 to 23, which greatly decreases the computational complexity. Dempster's combination rule is utilized to aggregate the assessment of risk factors. We illustrate a numerical example and use the proposed method to deal with the risk priority evaluation in FMEA. The results and comparison show that the proposed method is more flexible and reasonable for real applications. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
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| Keywords: | failure mode and effects analysis risk priority number Dempster– Shafer evidence theory belief function evidential downscaling method |
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