Failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) - also "modes of failure", plural, in many publications - was one of the first systematic and structured techniques for fault analysis. It was developed by reliability engineers in the late 1950s to study problems that could arise from malfunctioning military systems. An FMEA is often the first step in a system reliability study. It involves reviewing as many components, assemblies, and subsystems as possible to identify failure modes, and their causes and effects. For each component, failure modes and their resulting effects on the rest of the system are recorded in a specific FMEA worksheet. There are numerous variations of these worksheets. An FMEA may be a qualitative analysis, but it can be put on a quantitative basis when the mathematical failure rate models are combined with a statistical failure mode reason database.
There are some different types of FMEA analysis, such as:
• Functional
• Design
• Process
Sometimes FMEA is extended to FMECA (failure mode, effects and criticality analysis) to indicate that the criticality analysis is also performed.
FMEA is an inductive reasoning single point of failure analysis and is a key task in safety engineering, safety engineering and quality engineering.
A successful FMEA activity helps identify possible failure modes based on experience with products and processes similar to or based on the common physics of fault logic. It is widely used in the development and manufacturing industries in various phases of the product life cycle. The effects analysis refers to the study of the consequences of failures at the different levels of the system.
Functional analysis as input is required to determine correct failure modes at all system levels for both functional FMEA and hardware part FMEA. An FMEA is used to structure mitigation for risk reduction based on the reduction of the severity of the failure effect (mode) or based on the reduction of the probability of failure or both. The FMEA is in principle a complete inductive (direct logic) analysis, however the probability of failure can only be estimated or reduced by the understanding of the failure mechanism. Ideally, this probability will be reduced to "impossible to occur" by eliminating the causes (root). It is therefore important to include in FMEA an adequate depth of information on the causes of failure (deductive analysis).