Modified Prioritization Methodology for Risk Priority Number in Failure Mode and Effects Analysis
N. Sellappan, K. Palanikumar

Abstract
Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a proactive process aimed to evaluate a system, design, process and service for possible ways in which failures can occur. The FMEA procedure assigns a numerical value to each risk associated with causing a failure using severity, occurrence and detection indexes and Risk Priority Number (RPN) is obtained by multiplying these numerical values. The traditional FMEA prioritization method has two main deficiencies as: various sets of severity, occurrence and detection indexes may produce an identical value of RPN and taking average or higher numerical value, when the team has a disagreement in the ranking index. In this paper an attempt is made to develop a new RPN prioritization method to address these two deficiencies. The proposed method has been evaluated by case studies and statistical analysis techniques.

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