An integrated failure mode and effect analysis approach for accurate risk assessment under uncertainty

Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) is a reliability analysis technique that plays a prominent role in improving the reliability and safety of systems, products, and/or services. Although commonly used in quality improvement efforts, the conventional Risk Priority Number (RPN) method has been heavily criticized in the literature for its various limitations, such as in failure mode evaluations, risk factor weights, and RPN computation. In this article, we describe the application of an ELECTRE (ELimination Et Choix Traduisant la REalité)-based outranking approach for FMEA within the interval two-tuple linguistic environment. Considering different types of FMEA team members' assessment information, we employ a hybrid averaging operator to construct the group assessment matrix and use a modified ELECTRE method to analyze the group interval two-tuple linguistic data. Furthermore, the new risk-ranking model deals with the subjective and objective weights of risk factors concurrently, considering the degree of importance that each concept has in the risk analysis. The practicality and applicability of the proposed methodology are demonstrated by applying it to a risk evaluation problem of proton beam radiotherapy, and a comparative study is conducted to validate the effectiveness of the new FMEA approach.