Supporting Consensus Reaching on Prioritizing Failure Modes in Reliability Management: The Role of Social-Trust-Driven Rating Modifications Willingness

Failure modes and effect analysis (FMEA) is a promising reliability management approach widely used to prioritize the failure modes. Different backgrounds and levels of knowledge of FMEA participants may lead to substantial variation between their risk ratings, making the implementation of a consensus mechanism within FMEA to assist FMEA participants in reaching acceptable collective risk ratings worthwhile. Since social trust has an influence on individual's willingness to change risk ratings, this study discusses the role of social-trust-driven rating modifications willingness in prioritizing failure modes during the consensus reaching process. FMEA participants’ rejection of rating modifications suggestions significantly different from their trusted FMEA participants’ risk ratings is formulated as the basis assumption. Based on this assumption, a two-stage social-trust-driven consensus model is proposed to assist FMEA participants with linguistic distribution assessment in reaching consensus willingly. The proposed framework implements a social-trust-driven consensus model with a minimum number of rating modifications in its first stage and a social-trust-driven consensus model with a minimum distance of rating modifications in its second stage. A case study, related to the reliability management of automatic transmission of new energy vehicles, and a simulation analysis are presented and analyzed to validate the proposed FMEA approach.