Improved Quantitative Analysis Method of FMECA with Monte Carlo simulation

The paper aims to present an improved Failure Modes Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) method with Monte Carlo simulation. Traditional Risk Priority Number (RPN) method is the common solution for quantitative analysis of FMECA. However, it has its limitation. For example, traditional method adopts nature number to represent the evaluation of Occurrence, Severity and Detection which results in that the different failure modes may have the same RPN value. So the study proposes the Monte Carlo simulation as an improved tool for quantitative analysis of Occurrence, Severity and Detection which can effectively avoid the problems. The paper illustrates the updated method with flight control system of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).