Risk analysis of engineering systems for sustainable industrial development using the Taguchi approach

Purpose One of the key elements of a maintenance system is risk analysis because the risk level of an engineering system will determine the maintenance policy required. Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) is widely applied in evaluating risk of failure of engineering systems. However, the conventional FMEA used in analyzing risk by most industries has shortcomings such as an inability to utilize imprecise and interval data in prioritizing risk. To overcome these limitations, different variants of FMEA have been reported in the literature. However, these modified approaches are computationally intensive; hence, the purpose of this paper is to develop an efficient FMEA-based methodology that is easy to analyze and implement. Design/methodology/approach The proposed technique combines the Taguchi method with FMEA in order to analyze risk of engineering systems easily and effectively. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated with a case study of the fuel oil system of a marine diesel engine. Findings The results of the integrated Taguchi method and FMEA, when compared with well-known techniques, namely, VIKOR and compromise programming, from the literature are very similar. From the comparative analysis, it was evident that the proposed method is a viable option to the more computationally intensive approaches used in the literature. Originality/value The approach proposed is novel and simple and can be implemented more easily than approaches from the literature in analyzing risk.