FMECA of a turntable: A fuzzy assessment

Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) is one of the most used tool for identifying and evaluating failure modes of mechanical systems, in order to enhance reliability and safety of simple components or even complex systems. Despite of being widely applied, this tool presents some limitations on problem solving, like the impossibility of taking into account relative importance between Severity, Occurrence and Detectability of a failure and the difficulty in considering interdependency among different failure modes. In order to overtake traditional methodology limits, many authors have successfully adopted a fuzzy approach to FMEA. This paper illustrate possible advantages of this methodological approach and its extension to FMECA, providing a case study.