Application of AHP Method for Failure Modes and Effect Analysis (FMEA) in Aerospace Industry for Aircraft Landing System

FMEA has been used in the aerospace industry for many years; this industry has been growing rapidly, so reliability and safety guarantee have been of increasing concern within the aerospace industry. Conventional FMEA technique still imposes many common shortages in order to compute RPN, which is product of the Severity (S), Detection (D) and Occurrence (O). Conventional FMEA considers the important of the elements S, O and D with the same weight which is not effective in practical FMEA study. In our base article, the study was done by 4 experts using the fuzzy developed FMEA that yielded crisp RPN scores for the failure modes of the aircraft landing system used in the research, this imposes a problem when ranking the risks of those modes. In this study, we used AHP that helps decision makers find one that best suits their goal and their understanding of the problem. It provides a comprehensive and rational framework for structuring a decision problem, for representing and quantifying its elements, for relating those elements to overall goals, and for evaluating alternative solutions. When using the AHP method, expert‘s opinions and weights will be obtained and will be prioritized in a better way than FMEA weights. A pairwise comparison questionnaire was designed and distributed to 35 aerospace experts working in Jet Aviation, in Basel Switzerland, then critical selection factors were identified, consistency vector, index and rate were determined, ―expert choice 11.0‖ was applied to compute the outcomes. FMEA components were compared in the hierarchy, reaching the RPN and ranking its scores. RPN better values obtained showed the significant risk level attained by some FMs in the aircraft landing system that were used in our base study. Keywords: FMEA; AHP; Failure Mode; Risk Priority Number; Decision Making