Automating the FMEA process

Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is a design analysis procedure involving the investigation and assessment of the effects of all possible failure modes on a system. This kind of analysis is of growing importance in the automotive, aerospace and other advanced manufacturing industries, where increasingly complex electrical, electronic and mechanical systems are being combined in safety-critical applications. FMEA is an extremely tedious process because it demands detailed and systematic examination of the operation of all aspects of the design. However, this work must be carried out by professional engineers as it requires extensive experience of the domain. These two factors, painstaking work and expert judgment, indicate the great benefits that automated help will provide for design engineers. This paper describes a program which automates the prediction of the effect of failure modes for electrical systems. This is the most challenging task in FMEA and can only be fully achieved by integrating multiple models in a distributed reasoning architecture. The architecture is open-ended, and the paper shows how the program can be extended to encompass the full FMEA process