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Failure Modes, Risk Factors, Risk Priority Number, Risk Prioritization, Statistical Analysis

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a tool used for identifying, analyzing and prioritizing failure modes of a product and process. The traditional FMEA determines the risk priority of each failure mode using the risk priority number (RPN) by multiplying the ranks of the three risk factors namely the Severity (S), Occurrence (O) and Detection (D). FMEA is carried out by a team of members and the critical problem is that the team often demonstrates different opinions from one member to another. Then, there is a disagreement in ranking value for the three risk factors. In case average out of difference is considered, the different combination of three risk factors may produce an identical RPN value for different failure modes. In the present work, the modified RPN prioritization method is introduced into traditional FMEA to solve the above issue and this method is applied in the risk evaluation of water leakage in the building. Finally, the proposed method has been evaluated using statistical analysis techniques. The result indicates that the proposed method is useful for RPN evaluation and prioritization of failure modes.