AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH INTEGRATING 2-TUPLE AND LOWGA OPERATORS IN PROCESS FAILURE MODE AND EFFECTS ANALYSIS

Abstract

Process failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is used in the high-tech industry to assure process robustness. Traditionally, process FMEA uses the risk priority number (RPN) to evaluate the risk of failure. However, the RPN method has several main shortcomings. In order to improve the method of RPN evaluation, this paper proposes an innovative approach, integrating 2-tuple and the linguistic ordered weighted geometric averaging (LOWGA) operator in process FMEA. The main purpose of this study is to effectively resolve the main shortcomings of RPN evaluation to assure product and process robustness. In numerical verification, process FMEA of the color super-twisted nematic (CSTN) product is presented to further illustrate the proposed approach. After comparing the result that was obtained from the proposed method with both the traditional RPN method and the LOWGA method, it was found that the proposed approach provided a more accurate and reasonable ranking of the risk of failure. Moreover, the proposed method does not lose the useful information provided by the experts.