A Method and Tool Support for Model-based Semi-automated Failure Modes and Effects Analysis of Engineering Designs

Limitations in scope but also difficulties with the efficiency and scalability of present algorithms seem to have so far limited the industrial uptake of existing automated FMEA technology. In this paper, we describe a new tool for the automatic synthesis of FMEAs which builds upon our earlier work on fault tree synthesis. The tool constructs FMEAs from engineering diagrams (e.g. developed in Matlab-Simulink) that have been augmented with information about component failures. To generate a system FMEA, the tool first generates a “forest” of interconnected system fault trees by traversing the system model. This “forest” is then mechanically translated into a simple table of direct relationships between component and system failures, effectively a system FMEA. We describe the architecture of the tool and demonstrate its application on a steer-by-wire prototype. We also discuss its performance and show that this approach could lead to efficient ways of generating useful analyses from design representations. .