Applying Evidence Theory to Failure Mode and Effects Analysis

Abstract

Failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) has been widely applied to examine potential failures in systems designs and products The risk priority number (RPN) is the key criterion used to determine the risk priorities of the failure modes However traditional FMEA has many irrationalities and needs to be improved for more applications To overcome the shortcomings of traditional FMEA we propose an FMEA model based on fuzzy evidence theory Specifically the Dempster’s combination rule can’t generate reasonable results under low consensus situation In this study we propose an updated method to construct a BPA for risk evaluation We illustrate several examples and use the modified method to deal with a risk priority evaluation of the failure modes of the rotor blades of an aircraft engine The results show that the proposed approach is more flexible and reasonable for real applications than previous methods

Date of Award	2019
Original language	English
Supervisor	Liang-Hsuan Chen (Supervisor)