Failure Mode and Effects Analysis Using Generalized Mixture Operators

Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is a method based on teamwork to identify potential failures and problems in a system, design, process and service in order to remove them. The important part of this method is determining the risk priorities of failure modes using the risk priority number (RPN). However, this traditional RPN method has several shortcomings. Therefore, in this paper we propose a FMEA which uses generalized mixture operators to determine and aggregate the risk priorities of failure modes. In a numerical example, a FMEA of the LGS gas type circuit breaker product in Zanjan Switch Industries in Iran is presented to further illustrate the proposed method. The results show that the suggested approach is simple and provides more accurate risk assessments than the traditional RPN.