An ontology approach to support FMEA studies

FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) is a method to analyze potential reliability problems in the development cycle of the project, making it easier to take actions to overcome such issues, thus enhancing the reliability through design. FMEA is used to identify actions to mitigate the analyzed potential failure modes and their effect on the operations. Anticipating these failure modes, being the central step in the analysis, needs to be carried on extensively, in order to prepare a list of maximum potential failure modes. However, the information stored in risk assessment tools is in the form of textual natural language descriptions that limit computer-based extraction of knowledge for the reuse of the FMEA analyses in other designs or during plant operation. To overcome the limitations of text-based descriptions, FMEA ontology has been proposed that provides a basic set of standard concepts and terms. The development of the ontology uses an upper ontology based on ISO-15926, which defines general-purpose terms and act as a foundation for more specific domains. The ontology is developed so that engineers can build new concepts from the basic set of concepts. This paper evaluates the proposed ontology by means of use cases that measure the performance in finding relevant information used and produced during the safety analyses. In particular, the extraction of knowledge is performed using JTP (an object oriented modular reasoning system) that is used for querying the ontology.