System failure analysis based on DEMATEL–ISM and FMECA

A new method of system failure analysis was proposed. First, considering the relationships between the failure subsystems,the decision making trial and evaluation laboratory(DEMATEL) method was used to calculate the degree of correlation between the failure subsystems, analyze the combined effect of related failures, and obtain the degree of correlation by using the directed graph and matrix operations. Then, the interpretative structural modeling(ISM) method was combined to intuitively show the logical relationship of many failure subsystems and their influences on each other by using multilevel hierarchical structure model and obtaining the critical subsystems. Finally, failure mode effects and criticality analysis(FMECA) was used to perform a qualitative hazard analysis of critical subsystems, determine the critical failure mode, and clarify the direction of reliability improvement.Through an example, the result demonstrates that the proposed method can be efficiently applied to system failure analysis problems.