Failure Prevention in Design Through Effective Catalogue Utilization of Historical Failure Events

Abstract

The science of failure prevention relies heavily on the experience of personnel on a project. As the nation is about to face a tremendous decline in the experienced workforce due to the baby boomer generation's retirement, it is critical to begin focusing on capturing their knowledge. Cataloging and communicating the knowledge of potential failures is critical to prevent engineering disasters. Many companies have adopted failure-reporting systems that allow them to record their engineering failures to promote failure prevention. While recording this information is vital to learning from past mistakes, often the information is not stored so that engineers and designers can easily recall this valuable linguistic information and use it to improve designs. Therefore, more effective systems for cataloging and utilizing corporate memory of recorded failure events are needed. This article presents the design of a computational linguistic database to support the failure prevention tool, the risk in early design (RED) method. RED promotes failure prevention by identifying failure risks as early as the conceptual phase of product design, where impacts of failure prevention are greatest. It uses a database populated by historical failure event information to present specific areas that are at risk of failure in a product.

Model-based reliability analysis

“…Moreover, QFD matrices do not include human and environmental features. A comparison of the proposed methodology and the RED method (Grantham Lough et al, 2008) shows a difference in the treatment of failures of interactive functions. Suppose a failure is reported in a functional test, or a field test, with the description: "The ride comfort is bad, very hard and shocky on rough roads."…”

“…Several researchers have pointed out the importance of performing reliability assessments during the early stages of the development process (Grantham Lough et al 2008; Mutha et al 2013; Rahimi & Rausand 2013). Before system reliability tests can be performed, data from component or subsystem reliability tests are available, as well as data from functional tests.…”

Identifying Risk at the Conceptual Product Design Phase: A Web-Based Software Solution and Its Evaluation

“…The derived engineering languages for functions [28], components [29], and failures [30] are the backbone for effective construction of a RED knowledgebase. Previous research efforts focused on the construction of the electromechancial product failure knowledgebase [31] which is available for use in the RED program. The failure reports currently cataloged in the knowledgebase ome from National Transportation and Safety Board c (NTSB) reports, consumer product failure reports, ASM handbooks, etc.…”

“…For example, Vucovich, et al [32], used RED theory to calculate the risks of software products. Furthermore, Patil, et al [33] have used RED to perform risk assessments in the business domain, and Author et al [31] have leveraged the RED theory to predict risks for the implementation of lean manufacturing products [34] as well. Therefore, the web-based RED software includes a feature that enables users to upload their own database (or user-defined data) to assist in their risk assessments.…”

The role of bridging nodes in behavioral network models of complex engineered systems

“…An extension of FFDM, Risk in Early Design (RED), takes into account likelihood estimates (Grantham Lough et al. 2007, 2008). FFDM and RED connect system failures to loss of function in order to identify potential failures.…”