Failure mode databases and their knowledge-based management

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is generally appreciated in reliability engineering in industry fields. The Identification of failure mode is the crucial step of the analysis. Failure modes rely only on specific components rather than the system architecture, and therefore could be reused in different FMEAs. In this paper, we firstly make a survey on the existing failure mode databases and then provide a knowledge-based method to manage the failure modes so that they could be reused effectively. The methodology has two key points. One is ontology-based annotation, which is used to add ontological knowledge to existing databases. The other is to search and retrieve data based on semantic similarity. Additionally, a free software tool is developed to prove the feasibility of the method. Both the method and the tool could improve the quality and efficiency of FMEA in practical engineering.