Emerging trends in risk assessment and evaluation

Risk assessment is one of the primary tools that management teams use to determine if a product should be taken to market. If the risk associated with the product concept is at an acceptable level, the product proceeds into the design phase. Throughout the product lifecycle, the risk assessment is updated and refined as product functions are built out into the design. Different industries use different tools for risk assessment, but their purpose is the same: to minimize product risk factors. In this paper, we discuss emerging trends in risk assessment for increasing both the value and efficiency of analyses. For example, by taking a systems engineering approach to FMEAs, companies are now rolling failure modes laterally to other subassemblies that can be affected by the same failure rather than merely rolling these modes up product tree structures. Additionally, systems engineers are using the top-down approach common to fault tree analysis and then breaking out only the highest risks into detailed FMEAs to save time. Yet another trend includes linking a FMEA directly to a FRACAS. This allows a direct comparison of what failure modes were predicted to occur (and at what rate) against what is actually seen in the field. This paper will give case studies demonstrating these emerging trends in risk assessment.