A new rough PROMETHEE approach for the evaluation of potential failure modes and their effects in a general anesthesia process

Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) is a systematic framework applied to recognize and eliminate viable failures within objects, services, structures, or designs at the early stage of the production process. The existing traditional FMEA approaches come with inherent deficiencies, e.g., all risk factors having similar weights, inappropriate and crisp risk priority numbers, and neglecting the existence of uncertainty and vagueness in experts' judgment. Our purpose is to identify the drawbacks of the existing models and then improve the risk assessment of failure modes under uncertain environments. For this purpose, we present a novel FMEA technique based on rough numbers and preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluations (PROMETHEE) in multi-criteria decision-making problems. The presented FMEA model integrates the advantages of the PROMETHEE approach and the modified entropy weight method in coping with the roughness of linguistic assessment information. To illustrate its potential applications, the proposed method is tested to examine the risks of the general anesthesia process in the medical field. In the end, a comparison with the existing techniques is given to show the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed model.