A hybrid decision making framework for modified failure mode effects and criticality analysis: A case study on process plant induction motors

Assessing the severity of failure modes of critical industrial machinery is often considered as an onerous task and sometimes misinterpreted by shop-floor engineer/maintenance personnel. The purpose of this paper is to develop an improved FMECA method for prioritizing the failure modes as per their risk levels and validating the same through a real case study of induction motors used in a process plant.

This paper presents a novel hybrid multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach to prioritize different failure modes according to their risk levels by combining analytical hierarchy process (AHP) with a newly introduced MCDM approach, election based on relative value distance (ERVD). AHP is incorporated in the proposed approach to determine the criteria weights, evaluated in linguistic terms by industrial expert. Furthermore, ERVD, which is based on the concept of prospect theory of human cognitive process, is applied to rank the potential failure modes.

It is found that the proposed FMECA approach provides better results in accordance with the actual industrial scenario and helps in effectively prioritizing the failure modes. A comparison is also made to highlight the differences of results between the proposed approach with TOPSIS and conventional FMECA.

This research paper proposes an improved FMECA method and, thus, provides a deep insight to maintenance managers for effectively prioritizing the failure modes. The correct prioritization of failure modes will help in effective maintenance planning, thus reducing the downtime and improving profit to the organization.

A real case of process plant induction motor has been introduced in the research paper to show the applicability of this decision-making approach, and the approach is found to be suitable in correct prioritization of the failure modes.

Severity has been decoupled into various factors affecting it, to make it more relevant as per actual industrial scenario. Then, a novel modified FMECA has been developed using a hybrid MCDM approach (AHP and ERVD). This hybrid method, as well as its application in FMECA, has not been developed by any previous researcher. Moreover, the same has been thoroughly explained by considering a real case of process plant induction motors and validated with cross-functional experts.