PFMEA for distributed manufacturing environments

The Process Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (PFMEA) is a powerful tool to design and maintain reliable manufacturing processes, investigating the potential failure modes from the threefold perspective of severity, occurrence and detection. Being progressively characterized by decentralized networks of flexible manufacturing facilities, the current scenario somehow hampers the application of the traditional PFMEA, which requires the joint work of a group of experts formulating collective judgments. This paper revisits the traditional PFMEA approach and integrates it with the ZMII-technique – i.e., a recent aggregation technique based on the combination of the Thurstone’s Law of Comparative Judgment and the Generalized Least Squares method – which allows experts dispersed through organizations and countries to formulate their judgments individually. The revisited approach also includes a relatively versatile response mode and overcomes several other limitations of the traditional approach, including but not limited to: (i) arbitrary categorization and aggregation of the expert judgments, (ii) disregarding the dispersion of these judgments, and (iii) disregarding the uncertainty of results. The description is supported by a real-life application example concerning a plastic injection-moulding process.