Developing an Analysis and Prioritization Method of the Marine Propulsion System Hazards

The FMEA method is one of the safety and reliability management techniques, which is very effective in identifying and eliminating potential problems in the product design and production process. Despite the extensive use of the Risk Priority Number (RPN) in FMEA, it is criticized due to shortcomings such as the inability to analyze crashes with a common cause, high duplicate RPN values and the lack of direct and indirect relationships among failures and the causes. Considering the importance of safety in marine industry, this paper describes the implementation of an aggregating method of TOPSIS and DEMATEL which is able to overcome common shortcoming of traditional RPN method in a marine propulsion system. The implementation of the method in prioritizing the main root causes led to more desirable results compared to the traditional RPN and DEMATEL base methods.