Failure modes and e€ects analysis (FMEA) is a quality improvement and risk assessment tool commonly used in industry. It is a living document used to capture design and process failure information. However, the traditional FMEA has its limitations in terms of knowledge capture and reuse. In order to increase its e€ectiveness, much research has been carried out to ®nd an e€ective way to provide ...

In any organization, the importance of failuremanagement cannot bementionedby a single word. However,most failure analysis is dominated by themanufacturing sector, despite the increasing importance of the service sector. In response, this paper proposes a systematic approach for identifying and evaluating potential failures using a service-specific failure mode and effect analysis (service-spec...

BACKGROUND Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is a risk management tool to proactively identify and assess the causes and effects of potential failures in a system, thereby preventing them from happening. The objective of this study was to evaluate effectiveness of FMEA applied to an academic clinical trial center in a tertiary care setting. METHODS A multidisciplinary FMEA focus group ...

PURPOSE To report our early experiences with failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) in a community practice setting. METHODS The FMEA facilitator received extensive training at the AAPM Summer School. Early efforts focused on department education and emphasized the need for process evaluation in the context of high profile radiation therapy accidents. A multidisciplinary team was assembled ...

FMEA is a useful tool that helps to find possible flaws in a system or element, mainly in the design phase. But it is a mere document that has no further ''direct'' use than the observation. Mapping all this knowledge into a Bayesian Network would make it possible to use the information in further ways, like software applications for maintenance. A good FMEA has the necessary features to build ...

The goal of quality and reliability systems is the same-to achieve customer satisfaction. Quality and reliability are synonymous. A system cannot be reliable if it does not have high quality. Likewise, a system cannot be of high quality if it is not reliable. The quality performance of a firm is often assessed by the reliability of the firm's equipment or machinery. If a system is unreliable, i...

An ontology for representing operating, safety and control procedures is proposed in this paper that supports diagnosis based on following these procedures and combining observed malfunctions with Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) information. The procedure ontology is defined within interconnected components of the process plant, diagnostic analysis (where the FMEA is described) and pro...

Functional safety standards (ISO 26262, IEC 61508) require a safety life cycle which demands additional design and engineering tasks to be managed. This paper addresses how the existing FMEAs have to be extended and refocused to address and overview signal paths throughout the system. The safety standards require to classify signals with a SIL (Safety Integrity Level) and the higher the SIL the...

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis is widely used in engineering hardware systems to help in understanding the effects of potential failures and the faults that cause them to occur. The analysis is iterative leading to improvements in the design until the risks associated with potential failure modes are reduced to an acceptable level. Interest in applying the technique to software has increased...

Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is a method based on teamwork to identify potential failures and problems in a system, design, process and service in order to remove them. The important part of this method is determining the risk priorities of failure modes using the risk priority number (RPN). However, this traditional RPN method has several shortcomings. Therefore, in this paper we p...