Automatic Acquisition of Failure Mode and Effect Analysis Ontology for Sustainable Risk Management

In this piece of research, we have presented an approach to populate Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) ontology from existing worksheets prepared by experts. FMEA is a commonly used method for risk assessment in any organization. This method is initiated by domain experts who analyze all the associated risks to a product or process, their causes, severity, effects and mitigation actions. Besides domain experts, time and cost are the other two factors involved in successful completion of FMEA. Reusability of the knowledge produced at the end of this method can bring numerous benefits to an organization. Some ontologies are available for semantic content management of FMEA knowledge but in order to avail their full benefits, it is must that they can acquire the existing knowledge automatically. Major objective of this article is to develop an algorithm, which can populate FMEA ontology from existing worksheets. Major contribution of this work is to identify an existing FMEA ontology and its evaluation for schema and relationship richness, then its automatic population using proposed algorithm without human intervention, and finally making it a part of complete knowledge management system. Our proposed algorithm correctly mapped 1357 instances to FMEA ontology from manually prepared FMEA spreadsheets. This FMEA ontology has been queried by domain experts and it was proved to be very helpful in experts like decision-making.