Failure modes and effects analysis through knowledge modelling

Failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) is a widely used quality improvement and risk assessment tool in manufacturing. Accumulated information about design and process failures recorded through FMEA provides very valuable knowledge for future product and process design. However, the way the knowledge is captured poses considerable difficulties for reuse. This research aims to contribute to the reuse of FMEA knowledge through a knowledge modelling approach. An attempt is made to shift FMEA activities to the conceptual design stage. The early warning about possible failures will enable designers to avoid costly and difficult design changes at later stages of the design process. An object-oriented approach has been used to create an FMEA model. Functional diagrams have been used for the conceptual model. The FMEA model is assisted by functional reasoning techniques to enable automatic FMEA generation from historical data. The reasoning technique also provides a means for the creation of new knowledge. The FMEA generation process has been discussed. The automatic generation replaces the traditional brainstorming process for FMEA report creation. Failure report is used as the data source for the FMEA generation. The proposed method has been evaluated with a prototype software and case studies. (C) 2004 Published by Elsevier B.V.