Supporting consensus reaching on prioritizing failure modes in reliability management: The role of social trust-driven rating-modifications willingness

Failure modes and effect analysis (FMEA) is a promising reliability management approach widely used to prioritize the failure modes. Different backgrounds and levels of knowledge of FMEA participants may lead to substantial variation between their risk-ratings, making the implementation of a consensus mechanism within FMEA to assist FMEA participants in reaching acceptable collective risk-ratings worthwhile. Since social trust has an influence on individual's willingness to change risk-ratings, this study discusses the role of social trust-driven rating-modifications willingness in prioritizing failure modes during the consensus reaching process. FMEA participants' rejection of rating-modifications suggestions significantly different to their trusted FMEA participants' risk-ratings is formulated as the basis assumption. Based on this assumption, a two-stage social trust-driven consensus model is proposed to assist FMEA participants with linguistic distribution assessment in reaching consensus willingly. The proposed framework implements a social trust-driven consensus model with minimum number of rating-modifications in its first stage, and a social trust-driven consensus model with minimum distance of rating-modifications in its second stage. A case study, related to the reliability management of automatic transmission of new energy vehicles, and a simulation analysis are presented and analyzed to validate the proposed FMEA approach.