Z-number integrated weighted VIKOR technique for hazard prioritization and its application in virtual prototype based EOT crane operations

Abstract Hazard identification and its ranking is one of the foundation steps of safety management. Nowadays, failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA), a reliability analysis tool, is widely used to identify, assess, and rank hazards/failure events related to products, processes, and services because of its simplistic nature. Traditional FMEA focus on computing the risk priority number (RPN) to rank the identified hazards based on three risk factors, occurrence (O), severity (S), and detectability (D) of a failure mode (FM). However, the traditional RPN method has been criticized because of its limitations in the assessment of hazards/failure events, weighting of the risk factors, and prioritization of the FMs. Furthermore, experts usually provide rating on the risk factors based on their expertise, which introduces impreciseness, uncertainty, and vagueness in the subsequent assessments. In this study, Z-number is used to capture the uncertainty and unreliability associated with experts’ evaluation. Also, the concept of objectivity is deployed along with subjectivity in the weight calculation of the risk factors in the information assessment process. Classic VIKOR (ViseKriterijum-ska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje) method is also extended in Z-environment to rank the identified hazards by incorporating the concepts of maximum group utility and minimum regret. For the illustration purpose, we have applied our proposed method in virtual prototyping based EOT crane operations. Sensitivity analysis and comparative evaluation with the existing methods are also presented to validate our proposed method.