Risk Assessment in Failure Mode and Effect Analysis: Improved ORESTE Method With Hesitant Pythagorean Fuzzy Information

As a system reliability analysis technology, failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) has been widely used in various industries to reduce the failure risk of products, systems, and services. In recent years, many researchers have found that this technology has limitations in failure mode assessment and failure mode prioritization in complex uncertain environment. In order to solve this problem, this article proposes a new FMEA model, which combines hesitant Pythagorean fuzzy sets (HPFSs) and ORESTE method. Specifically, HPFSs are used to describe the risk assessment information of experts. The ORESTE method is extended to determine the risk priority of the failure modes in FMEA. Moreover, the PIR structure of ORESTE is improved to reduce the subjective influence of experts. Finally, an example of risk assessment of intelligent aquaculture system is given to verify the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed FMEA model. The results show that the proposed FMEA model can not only accurately describe the hesitation and uncertainty of experts’ risk assessment information, but also obtain more suitable risk ranking of failure modes, based on which managers can further take corresponding preventive measures.