Project name: FLAME
An Automated FMEA Assistant
Start date: January 1993 Finish date: December 1995
Funding
SERC ACME Grant £201 000
Staff
Chris Price, David Pugh, Neal Snooke
Objectives
Failure mode effects analysis (FMEA) involves the investigation and assessment of the effects of all possible failure modes on a system. This kind of analysis is of growing importance in the automotive and aerospace industries, where increasingly complex electrical, electronic and mechanical systems are being combined in safety-critical applications.
FMEA work is intended to be carried out during the design stage as it is important that designs are analysed for hazardous and safety-critical situations. This is an extremely tedious process because it demands detailed and systematic examination of all aspects and parts of the design. However this work must be carried out by professional engineers because it requires extensive experience of the domain.
These two factors, painstaking work and expert judgement, indicate the great benefit that automated help with this process might provide for design engineers. This project is constructing computer software capable of providing such help and significantly reducing the burden on over-worked engineers. This software will give a level of automated help for FMEA that it has not possible to provide in the past.
Our previous research in this area (on the Jacquard Project) showed that an automated FMEA system was feasible if model-based reasoning techniques were used to infer the effects of each failure mode. We constructed experimental software to demonstrate how such reasoning could be done. We considered several further issues pertinent to a practical automated FMEA system, and identified where further work would be needed in order to be able to produce such a system.
On the FLAME project, we are producing a FMEA demonstrator that will be usable by electrical engineers. It should be capable of automating FMEA for all electrical circuits in a car, and will be installed at Jaguar and Ford for on-the-job evaluation by their FMEA engineers.
Methodology
Collaborators on the project are: Jaguar Cars, Ford Motor Company, Motor Industry Research Association, Integral Solutions Ltd.
Results
The results of the research will be of generic benefit across industries where FMEA is performed, and should be eminently exploitable through the construction of software packages that could be sold to engineering industry throughout the world.