Managing uncertainty of expert’s assessment in FMEA with the belief divergence measure

Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is an effective model that identifies the potential risk in the management process. In FMEA, the priority of the failure mode is determined by the risk priority number. There is enormous uncertainty and ambiguity in the traditional FMEA because of the divergence between expert assessments. To address the uncertainty of expert assessments, this work proposes an improved method based on the belief divergence measure. This method uses the belief divergence measure to calculate the average divergence of expert assessments, which is regarded as the reciprocal of the average support of assessments. Then convert the relative support among different experts into the relative weight of the experts. In this way, we will obtain a result with higher reliability. Finally, two practical cases are used to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of this method. The method can be used effectively in practical applications.