Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
10322811 Expert Systems with Applications 2015 41 Pages PDF
Abstract
The analysis of failure modes and their effects generally requires dealing with uncertainty and subjectivity inherent in the risk assessment process. A review of the literature reveals that although a number of studies have examined these issues, none of them have explicitly studied the variation in one expert's understanding (intra-personal uncertainty) and the variations in the understanding among experts (inter-personal uncertainty) together. To address this problem, this paper proposes a new fuzzy FMEA approach based on IT2 fuzzy sets, which has the ability to capture both intra-personal and inter-personal uncertainty. The approach introduces three methods that are new for the analysis of failure modes. First, to provide a more accurate representation of the aggregated data by preserving the variations among the individual judgments a new aggregation method is suggested. It transforms individual judgments in form of intervals into a group judgment in form of an IT2 FN. Second, to allow considering optimal weights for the risk factors and thereby developing more flexible structures for their synthesis, an α-cut based ordered weighted averaging operator is adapted. Finally, to rank failure modes on a continuous scale and reflect subtle differences in the assessments properly, a ranking method for IT2 FNs based on α-cuts is adopted. The applicability and effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by an illustrative example. Comparisons with the results of crisp- and fuzzy-based methods demonstrate that the proposed approach offers additional flexibility to the experts in making judgments and provides a better modeling of uncertainty.
Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Computer Science Artificial Intelligence
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