Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA) is popular and versatile approach applicable to risk assessment and safety improvement of a repairable engineering system. This method encompasses various fields such as manufacturing, healthcare, paper mill, thermal power industry, software industry, services, security etc. in terms of its application. In general, FMEA is based on Risk Priority Number (RPN) score which is found by product of probability of Occurrence (O), Severity of failure (S) and Failure Detection (D). As human judgement is approximate in nature, the accuracy of data obtained from FMEA members depend on degree of subjectivity. The subjective knowledge of members not only contains uncertainty but hesitation too which in turn, affect the results. Fuzzy FMEA considers uncertainty and vagueness of the data/ information obtained from experts. In order to take into account, the hesitation of experts and vague concept, in the present work we propose integrated framework based on Intuitionistic Fuzzy- Failure Mode Effect Analysis (IF-FMEA) and IF-Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (IF-TOPSIS) techniques to rank the listed failure causes. Failure cause Fibrizer (FR) was found to be the most critical failure cause with RPN score 0.500. IF-TOPSIS has been implemented within IF-FMEA to compare and verify ranking results obtained by both the IF based approaches. The proposed method was presented with its application for examining the risk assessment of cutting system in sugar mill industry situated in western Uttar Pradesh province of India. The result would be useful for the plant maintenance manager to fix the best maintenance schedule for improving availability of cutting system.
Identifying preventive maintenance guideline for a combine harvester with application of failure mode and effect analysis technique
