A Novel FMEA-Based Approach to Risk Analysis of Product Design Using Extended Choquet Integral

Improving reliability and eliminating the potential design risk are crucial for product design. Failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA), as an effective reliability assurance tool, has been extensively used in product design. However, causalities among failure modes, interactions among risk factors, and correlations among risk evaluations were not jointly considered in existing FMEA methods. On the other hand, the cost and time caused by the occurrence of failure modes were seldom incorporated into risk factors. Due to the lack of accurate values and/or information loss of customers and experts, these risk factors inevitably contain uncertainty that cannot be overlooked in product design. In this article, a novel FMEA-based approach is proposed to facilitate risk analysis of product design under uncertainty. In this approach, the stable grey causality vector state and the grey interaction vector are respectively established to characterize causalities and interactions. To reduce the uncertainty contained in cost and time, the extended information axiom is put forth, and then, their grey information contents can be obtained and are to be incorporated into the design. Subsequently, we extend Choquet integral to prioritize the potential failure modes and identify the optimal design scheme while coping with correlations. The proposed approach is validated by an example of a substrate design.