Title: A multiple-criteria decision analysis for criticality of boiler tube failures in interval type-2 fuzzy environment

Authors: Ashoke Kumar Bera; Dipak Kumar Jana

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Haldia Institute of Technology, Haldia, Purba Midnapur-721657, W.B., India ' School of Applied Science and Humanities, Haldia Institute of Technology, Haldia Purba Midnapur-721657, West Bengal, India

Abstract: This paper presents a multi-factor decision-making approach for prioritising criticality of failure modes as an alternative to traditional approach of failure mode effect and criticality analysis (FMECA). A review of the literature reveals that although a number of studies have been done on these issues, but none of them have explicitly studied the variations in expert's opinion (intra-personal uncertainty) and the variations in the understanding among experts (inter-personal uncertainty) together. To deal with this problem, this literature proposes a new fuzzy FMECA approach based on IT2 fuzzy sets, which has the ability to capture both intra-personal and inter-personal uncertainty. This approach introduces a more accurate representation of the aggregated data by presenting variations among the individual judgements into type-2 fuzzy numbers, allowing suitable weights for each risk factor by decision makers and thereby developing a flexibility for analysis. The proposed method is applied to evaluate the criticality of different failure modes of boiler tubes of a coal-fired thermal power plants. Interval type-2 fuzzy sets with signed distances, a multi criteria decision-making tool, is used to evaluate the criticalities of the different failure modes (alternatives) of the system.

Keywords: failure mode effect and criticality analysis; FMECA; interval type-2 fuzzy set; multiple-criteria decision analysis; signed distance; linear assignment method; interval type-2 fuzzy number.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2019.102411

International Journal of Operational Research, 2019 Vol.36 No.2, pp.209 - 231

Received: 03 Aug 2016
Accepted: 12 Nov 2016
Published online: 24 Sep 2019 *

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