New FMECA Methodology Using Structural Importance and Fuzzy Theory

Failure mode effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) is one of most widely used methods in modern engineering system to investigate potential failure modes and its severity upon the system. Although there are several FMECA standards, the most popular one is MIL-STD-1629A from the U. S. Department of Defense. While carrying out FMECA, experts evaluate the severity and criticality of each failure mode and visualize the risk level matrix putting those indices to column and row variable, respectively. This kind of subjective evaluation inevitably brings ambiguity on the result. In order to handle the ambiguity, this paper proposes a new FMECA procedure using proposed structural importance (PSI) and fuzzy theory. The severity is evaluated by structural importance called PSI using minimal cut set objectively, while the criticality is determined by failure rate. Finally, the risk level is compounded of these indices by fuzzy expert system in order to resolve the ambiguity of traditional methods.This work was supported in part by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (2010-0021733) and in part by the development of high efficiency power supply system and simulation technology for electric railway (PK11003G) through the Korea Railroad Research Institute. Paper no. TPWRS-00733-2010