Failure Mode and Effect Analysis Using Large-Scale Group Decision Making and Normal Cloud Model

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is crucial for complex system reliability. However, traditional FMEA and its existing enhancements face significant limitations. These notably include difficulties in handling diverse heterogeneous data, effectively coordinating large expert groups, and robustly propagating inherent uncertainties. To bridge these critical gaps, this paper proposes an innovative and robust FMEA framework, specifically designed for Large Group Decision Making (LGDM) under uncertainty, leveraging the Normal Cloud Model (NCM). First, LGDM is genuinely integrated into FMEA by involving an unprecedented number of experts (>50). Second, a broad spectrum of heterogeneous data, including exact numbers, interval numbers, NCMs, linguistic terms, and linguistic expressions, is utilized to effectively model and manage diverse uncertainties. Third, a four-step data preprocessing method is incorporated to efficiently screen invalid and low-quality inputs, significantly enhancing the reliability of aggregated results. Fourth, an innovative and comprehensive expert weight determination method that judiciously combines subjective factors with objective data quality is proposed, ensuring more trustworthy and equitable aggregation of judgments. Distinctively, our method explicitly preserves and propagates uncertainty information across the entire computational process, yielding more insightful and informative results beyond simple rankings, encompassing detailed quantitative uncertainty analysis. A practical case study, alongside detailed result analysis, sensitivity analysis, both qualitative and quantitative comparative analysis, and advantages and limitations analysis, collectively confirms the effectiveness, practicality, rationality, and robustness of the proposed method. The sensitivity analyses demonstrate that the final risk rankings are highly stable even under varying trade-off coefficients, confirming the method's strong robustness and insensitivity to parameter fluctuations. Our framework provides a scientifically advanced and robust approach for FMEA in complex decision-making environments, particularly applicable to high-stakes industries such as modern aviation, thereby enabling more informed risk management decisions.