FlowSort-GDSS – A novel group multi-criteria decision support system for sorting problems with application to FMEA

• Most of real world decision making activities involve multiple decision-makers.
• FlowSort-GDSS (group decision support system) is proposed to solve sorting problems with multiple decision-makers.
• FlowSort-GDSS is applied to the failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA).
• A blow moulding process is analysed by the FMEA approach combined with FlowSort-GDSS.

Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is a well-known approach for correlating the failure modes of a system to their effects, with the objective of assessing their criticality. The criticality of a failure mode is traditionally established by its risk priority number (RPN), which is the product of the scores assigned to the three risk factors, which are likeness of occurrence, the chance of being undetected and the severity of the effects. Taking a simple “unweighted” product has major shortcomings. One of them is to provide just a number, which does not sort failures modes into priority classes. Moreover, to make the decision more robust, the FMEA is better tackled by multiple decision-makers. Unfortunately, the literature lacks group decision support systems (GDSS) for sorting failures in the field of the FMEA.In this paper, a novel multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method named FlowSort-GDSS is proposed to sort the failure modes into priority classes by involving multiple decision-makers. The essence of this method lies in the pair-wise comparison between the failure modes and the reference profiles established by the decision-makers on the risk factors. Finally a case study is presented to illustrate the advantages of this new robust method in sorting failures.