A fuzzy TOPSIS and Rough Set based approach for mechanism analysis of product infant failure

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engappai.2015.06.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Root causes identification of product infant failure is nowadays one of the critical topics in product quality improvements. This paper puts forward a novel technical approach for mechanism analysis of product infant failure based on domain mapping in Axiomatic Design and the quality and reliability data from product lifecycle in the form of relational tree. The proposed method could intelligently decompose the early fault symptoms into root causes of critical functional parameters in function domain, design parameters in physical domain and process parameters in process domain successively. More specifically, both qualitative and quantitative attributes of quality and reliability types are considered for solving the root causes weight computation problem of product infant failure, this approach emphasizes the integrated application of artificial intelligence techniques of Rough Set and fuzzy TOPSIS to compute the weight of root causes. In order to enumerate the latent root causes of product infant failure, connotation of product infant failure based on the product reliability evolution model in the life cycle and data integration model of quality and reliability in production based on the extended QR chain are presented firstly. Then, a decomposition method for relational tree of product infant failure is studied based on domains of functional, physical and process in Axiomatic Design. The failure relation weight computation of root causes (nodes of relational tree) is considered as multi-criteria decision making problem (MCDM) by integrated application of Rough Set and fuzzy TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution), which the Rough Set is used to mining the quality data and fuzzy TOPSIS is adopted to model the computation process of failure relation weight. Finally, the validity of the proposed method is verified by a case study of analyzing a car infant failure about body noise vibration harshness complaint, and the result proves that the proposed approach is conducive to improve the intelligent level of root causes identification for complex product infant failure.

Introduction

Quality improvement is a routine mission of the product engineering, and the optimization of product infant failure rate is the most important and difficult task (Köksal et al., 2011, Gall et al., 2001). Infant failures have often been referred to the quality problems occurred in the “infant” region of leftmost of bathtub curve of product life (Roesch, 2012), and infant failures are assumed to be caused mainly by design vulnerabilities and manufacturing defects (Jiang and Murthy, 2009). Because of the high occurrence possibility of early failures in infant life, the infant failure rate always keeps unexpectedly high and received extensive attention.

In order to accelerate the decrease of the infant failure rate, the burn-in test is employed for screening potential early life defects. By testing the manufactured items under accelerated stress conditions (that is increased temperature, voltage stress etc.), early failures are weeded out. Therefore, high reliability of the delivered products could be ensured (Kurz et al., 2014). Despite the widespread application of the burn-in test to detect infant failures in product reliability engineering, research on the analysis approach of product infant failure mechanism is few. Most current researches are focused on the estimation of lifetime distributions from perspectives of traditionally statistical inferences.

It is a basic assumption that every failure has explainable physical or functional causes related to hardware, software and service (Nakao et al., 2009). The goal of failure mechanism analysis is to identify the root causes, determine what the sensitive factors including design, manufacturing and usage are involved, and quantify the results (Bernstein, 2014). The root cause is the most basic causal factor or factors that, if corrected or removed, will prevent the recurrence of the failure. Identifying root causes is the key task of failure mechanism analysis, and the correctness of the results is crucial to preventing similar failure occurrences in the future (Kapur and Pecht, 2014).

In the age of big data (Gil et al., 2014, Einav and Levin, 2014), with advances in automation and computer systems, intelligent quality improvement of industrial products and processes requires integration and analysis of big data to solve quality related manufacturing problems (Montgomery, 2014, Meeker and Hong, 2014, Köksal et al., 2011). How to identify and confirm the accurate root causes set of product infant failure from the lifecycle quality and reliability data is a prerequisite to develop continuous in-process quality improvement (Shi, 2013). Traditional methods such as Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) (O’Connor and Kleyner, 2012) are always confined to reliability data and statistical analysis. Still, the general analysis approach for product infant failures in the context of big data and artificial intelligence methodology has not drawn the attention it deserves. Driven by these requirements, the paper puts forward a general technical approach for mechanism analysis for engineering product infant failures by integration the lifecycle quality and reliability data and artificial intelligence techniques of Rough Set and fuzzy TOPSIS for the first time, which could intelligently decompose early fault symptoms into critical functional, design and production parameters in the form of relational tree based on the domain mapping in Axiomatic Design (Suh, 2001). Specifically, this approach emphasizes the integrated application of the artificial intelligence techniques in dealing with this type of problems, in which the Rough Set is used to mining the quality data and fuzzy TOPSIS is adopted to model the computation process of failure relation weight of root causes.

The main contributions of this paper are

  • a)

    A general decomposition method of root causes based on relational tree for product infant failure is brought forth. This approach could intelligently decompose the early fault symptoms into root causes of critical functional, design and production parameters systematically.

  • b)

    The failure relation weight computation of root causes is formulated as multi-criteria decision making problem (MCDM) for considering both quantitative and qualitative attributes. Fuzzy is incorporated to remove the vagueness of the decision process. Although, the fuzzy TOPSIS method used to solve the problem is not novel, its application in the mechanism analysis of product infant failure is proposed for the first time here.

  • c)

    New attributes to compute the weight of root causes are proposed after several rounds of discussions with the industries.

  • d)

    Rough Set is adopted to mine the value of each criterion directly from historical quality evaluation data. Decision makers are indirectly involved for setting the mining rules for identification of weight values.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: in Section 2 we give brief literature review of infant failure analysis and fuzzy MCDM. Section 3 expounds the connotation of product infant failure. In Section 4 we focus on preliminary definitions of Rough Set and fuzzy TOPSIS. Section 5 presents the intelligent analysis method of product infant failure mechanism based on the relational tree. Section 6 offers a case study of an infant failure analysis of car NVH. Finally, Section 7 provides conclusions and perspectives.

Section snippets

State of the art

A number of researchers about infant failure have focused on the estimation method of lifetime distributions from perspectives of traditionally statistical inferences (Kuo and Kim, 1999; Gall et al., 2001; Bebbington et al., 2009). However, only a few research works have been done on the mechanism analysis and root causes identification of product infant failure so far. In this section, some important analysis works about infant failure mechanisms and root causes are summarized.

We have used

Product reliability evolution model in the life cycle

There is an evolution process of product reliability proposed by Murthy (2010) in product life cycle, including design reliability, inherent reliability, reliability at sale and field reliability, as shown in Fig. 1.

As shown in Fig. 1, design reliability is determined by the business objectives and reliability specifications and it defines what the ideal reliability state of a product should be. Via the procurement, machining, assembling and delivery inspection processes in the production of

Theoretical background

Although Rough Set and fuzzy TOPSIS are a well discussed concept with several applications in artificial intelligence, the theoretical background of methodology proposed in this paper is highlighted in this section. In many situations where performance rating and weights cannot be given precisely, the Rough Set theory is introduced to model the uncertainty of human judgments and such problems is known as fuzzy multiple criteria decision making (FMCDM). Pawlak (1982) first introduced Rough Set

Relational tree FFPP of product infant failure

Main assignment of the intelligent analysis method is to build a general relational tree of product infant failures based on the collected data, namely to form the hierarchical tree of function requirements, physical parameter and process variables of a product. In view of the following reasons, a new approach of constructing relational tree of product infant failure is put forward: ① Product assembly tree is too large to directly map product infant failure to its corresponding nodes. ② Product

Case study

During the early usage of cars, the problem of noise vibration harshness (NVH) of body stands out in customer complaints. It is a typical infant failure of car, and how to identify the formation mechanism and identify the root causes of this failure is always a dilemma for car producers. Therefore, a case study of a NVH failure analysis with the proposed methodology is provided in this section.

NVH failure descriptions in detail are presented in Table 3.

The main task of this illustrative example

Conclusions and perspectives

In this paper, the connotation and intelligent analysis method of product infant failure mechanism are proposed, and the artificial intelligence techniques of fuzzy TOPSIS and Rough Set are being applied firstly to identify the root causes of the product infant failure. We would conclude with the following remarks:

  • ① Clarification of product reliability evolution in the life cycle and integration model of quality and reliability data in production based on the extended QR chain are beneficial to

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Grant 61473017 from the National Natural Science Foundation of China. The authors would like to thank the editors and the anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions for improving this paper.

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