A novel improved FMEA method using data envelopment analysis method and 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic model

Since the failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) technique has the advantage of simple and fast calculation, the FMEA method is widely and commonly used in solving risk assessment issues. The traditional FMEA method uses the product of risk assessment factors (occurrence, severity, and detection) to calculate risk priority number (RPN) for risk ranking. Although the RPN approach is widely adopted by the military and industry, it cannot process uncertain and incomplete information, it does not consider the relative importance of three risk assessment factors and in some situations, it loses some valuable information provided by experts. This results in the same RPN value which cannot provide the accurate risk level. In order to effectively solve these problems, this paper combined the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method and 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic representation model (2-tuple FLRM) and proposed a new model, called the 2-tuple DEA method, for ranking the risk of product (system) failures. In the numerical verification section, this paper applied the risk assessment of crawler crane to verify the rationality and correctness of the 2-tuple DEA approach. The calculation results confirm that the proposed 2-tuple DEA approach provides a more accurate failure risk ranking and retains all valuable information.