Risk Assessment in Intelligent Manufacturing Process: A Case Study of an Optical Cable Automatic Arranging Robot

Intelligent manufacturing is one of the indispensable parts in Industry 4.0, where the smart machines can perceive and operate automatically in production process to provide higher and more convenient efficiency. Nevertheless, some potential failures influencing the manufacturing may exist. It is necessary to identify the potential failures and evaluate their risk. Meanwhile, resources and environment protections have been the consensus around the world. For enterprises, they must take measures to reduce the negative environmental impacts during the industrial production to maintain their sustainable development. Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) can effectively recognize failures and evaluate their risk in a production process or a system. However, environmental aspects of the identified failure modes are often ignored in the FMEA. Besides, conventional FMEA usually uses the risk priority number to obtain the failures' risk, which has a lot of shortcomings in the industrial application, such as the equal weights for different risk factors, crisp numbers used in the evaluation without considering vagueness, and so on. Based on the above two main problems, this paper develops an extended FMEA which introduces environmental impacts as one of the risk factors and utilizes Technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) method based on rough sets to cope with vague information. Finally, the developed FMEA is applied to evaluate the potential failure risk of an optical cable automatic arranging robot to verify its feasibility and effectiveness.