A new rough PROMETHEE approach for the evaluation of potential failure modes and their effects in a general anesthesia process

Abstract

Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) is a systematic framework that is broadly used to recognize and eliminate viable failures within objects, services, structures, designs, or organizations. In the general FMEA process, failure modes are assessed and ranked by the risk priority numbers which are attained through the product of crisp ratings of the risk elements such as detection, occurrence, and severity of each failure mode. But the traditional FMEA technique fails to deal with the uncertainty, present in complex systems. To enhance the effectiveness of conventional approaches, this paper presents a novel FMEA technique based on rough numbers and preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluations (PROMETHEE) in the multi-criteria decision-making problems. Rough numbers are applied to handle ambiguous information in terms of rough intervals instead of single numerical ratings. In the proposed approach, an entropy weight technique is applied to determine the weights of risk factors. This presented approach uses the usual criteria preference function to show the preferences of failure modes. The risk priorities of the recognized failure modes are acquired by the rough PROMETHEE method. To illustrate its potential applications, the proposed method is applied to examine the risks of the general anesthesia process in the medical field. In the end, a comparison with the existing techniques is also described to show the efficiency of the proposed model.