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a b s t r a c tFailure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is a well-known approach for correlating the failure modes of a system to their effects, with the objective of assessing their criticality. The criticality of a failure mode is traditionally established by its risk priority number (RPN), which is the product of the scores assigned to the three risk factors, which are likeness of occurrence, the chance of being undetected and the severity of the effects. Taking a simple ''unweighted'' product has major shortcomings. One of them is to provide just a number, which does not sort failures modes into priority classes. Moreover, to make the decision more robust, the FMEA is better tackled by multiple decision-makers. Unfortunately, the literature lacks group decision support systems (GDSS) for sorting failures in the field of the FMEA.In this paper, a novel multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method named FlowSort-GDSS is proposed to sort the failure modes into priority classes by involving multiple decision-makers. The essence of this method lies in the pair-wise comparison between the failure modes and the reference profiles established by the decision-makers on the risk factors. Finally a case study is presented to illustrate the advantages of this new robust method in sorting failures.

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Most complex decisions involve several stakeholders and therefore need to be solved using a group multi-criteria decision method. However, stakeholders or decision-makers often have divergent views, especially in the environmental sector. In order to integrate this divergence, a new group fuzzy PROMETHEE approach is introduced to combine the traditional environmental criteria of Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) with social and economic criteria. The modelling of uncertainty within the group of decision-makers using a fuzzy approach makes this method unique. The proposed fuzzy approach differs significantly from the standard one. The decision-makers express their judgments in crisp forms. In order to take into account the intrinsic dispersion of judgments within the group, a posteriori fuzzification procedure is applied. The crisp values are not simply aggregated; they are converted into a triangular fuzzy number based on the given evaluations. As a consequence, the definition of fuzzy membership functions, as required in standard fuzzy logic, is not required, which simplifies the process and makes it more reliable.