Abstract
Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is known as a useful method to analyze possible troubles which may ocour in a product or process during the design/development stage. The FMEA has not been widely applied in practice, however, due to some difficulties. Particularly, one of the main difficulties is the probability of omission of failure modes in failure mode prediction. This paper investigates problems on failure mode prediction, and proposes method to predict failure modes effectively. For this purpose, we analyzed causes of the omission of failure modes through investigation of actual prediction processes. As a result, some causes of the omission have been identified. Here we propose three approaches as follows to predict effectively failure modes with less omission. 1) Failure mode prediction based on "Association" 2) Preparation of Failure Mode Mechanism (FMM) diagram 3) Failure mode prediction based on "Hierarchy" We also verified effectiveness of the proposal through implementation of FMEA in a design group that developed a component of a car.
