Prioritizing failure risks of components based on information axiom for product redesign considering fuzzy and random uncertainties

The prioritization of the failure risks of the components in an existing product is critical for product redesign decision-making considering various uncertainties. Two issues need to be addressed in the failure risk prioritization process. One is the evaluation of the failure risk considering each failure mode for each component. Currently, many failure mode effects and analysis (FMEA) methods based on fuzzy logic seldom deal with the randomness in failure mode occurrence during the product operation stage. Therefore, in this research, the information axiom is extended to calculate the information contents of risk indices considering these two types of uncertainty. The second issue is the evaluation of the degree of failure risk for each of the components. The weighted sum of information content considering all failure modes is used to assess the risk of components based on a fuzzy logarithmic least squares method (FLLSM). Additionally, a case study to prioritize the failure risks of various components in a crawler crane is implemented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed approach.