Fuzzy assessment of FMEA for engine systems

When performing failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) for quality assurance and reliability improvement, interdependencies among various failure modes with uncertain and imprecise information are very difficult to be incorporated for failure analysis. Consequently, the validity of the results may be questionable. This paper presents a fuzzy-logic-based method for FMEA to address this issue. A platform for a fuzzy expert assessment is integrated with the proposed system to overcome the potential difficulty in sharing information among experts from various disciplines. The FMEA of diesel engine's turbocharger system is presented to illustrate the feasibility of such techniques. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.