Evaluation and ranking of failures in manufacturing process by combining best-worst method and VIKOR under type-2 fuzzy environment

Abstract

One of the important and persistent problems that engineers face in the automotive industry is the reliability of production equipment. This research promotes a new fuzzy multicriteria model for determining the priority of failures in an exact manner. In this way, the decision makers can determine the management activities whose application should result in enhanced manufacturing process reliability, promptly. The analysis of failures is based on Failure mode and effects analysis that is extended with added risk factors, which represents the incremental improvement compared to the current literature sources. The relative importance of risk factors and their values are presented by pre-defined linguistic expressions modelled by the interval type-2 fuzzy numbers. The assessment of risk factors' relative importance is set as a fuzzy group decision-making problem. The weights vector is determined by using the extended Best-Worst Method. The rank of failures is obtained by employing the modified VIseKriterijumska Optimizacija i kompromisno Resenje (Eng. Multi-criteria optimization and compromise solution) which reflects the scientific contribution of the research, and simultaneously, the second incremental improvement of the proposed model compared to the existing state of the art. These incremental improvements are: (i) The fuzzy algebra rules have been used for determining the group utility value and (ii) and individual regret value is determined by comparing the two interval type-2 fuzzy numbers. The model testing and verification are performed on real data in an automotive supply chain.