FUZZY ASSESSMENT OF FMEA FOR A SEWAGE PLANT

Abstract

Failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) is a widely used risk assessment tool to identify the potential failure modes of a product or a process. By ranking the priorities for corrective action according to the respective effects of the failures, the chance of the failures can be reduced or eliminated. However, there could be several difficulties during conducting conventional FMEA such as the subjective and qualitative description in natural language, the relative importance among the risk ratings, the difference of risk representation among the same ratings; and the knowledge shared among FMEA team members. Thus, a new risk assessment system based on fuzzy theory is proposed in this paper to deal with these difficulties. Furthermore, an FMEA is conducted for a sewage plant to demonstrate the proposed fuzzy assessment of FMEA.